Gary V. says that “you can’t please everybody“ is much too common a phrase these days.
He thinks that even just the effort to connect with the displeased on their blogs or on twitter is worthwhile. I could not agree more.
Except that pleasing everybody is different than caring about everybody.
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As a designer, I can hardly even please all of myself, let alone everybody else. ”You can’t please everybody“ is a useful phrase to me. It reminds me to side-step perceived perfection and just do the best that I can (and improve iteratively). At a time when ideas, content and products are moving faster than ever, this becomes increasingly important to keep in mind.
The fact that you can’t please everybody does not mean you can’t care about everybody, which I think is what Gary V. is really getting at. This is so important.
When I am designing something, I know that the buck ultimately stops at me. But, another major component to my work is taking in as many ideas, thoughts, images and experiences as possible so that I have a deep well to work with.
Feedback from users, people, provide this design-fuel in so many different forms. And communicating with them provides it in much greater magnitude.
Nice Translator has given us a good deal of experience in dealing with users. I’ve met some awesome people around the World and a lot of them started the conversation with negative feedback. Despite slightly rude comments at times, they are real people simply seeking human interaction in a digital world.
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Here’s an example (trimmed for the sake of brevity)
Frank
… NiceTranslator is not very useful to me if it can’t be relied upon for a simple translation such as this. Comments, please?
Frank D
Nicky
Hi Frank,
Thanks for your feedback! It’s true, Nice Translator is, at the end of the day, a machine translator and has its shortcomings. NT is great at capturing the general idea behind most sentences but there’s no way to guarantee it will be fully correct. Since we are using the Google Translation API, there isn’t much we can do to improve the quality of the translations, but Google is continually improving on the service so expect it to get better over time.
In the meantime, use NT for non-mission-critical translations! Enjoy 🙂
-Nicky
Frank
….
I get the feeling that you are a REAL LIVE PERSON and you really DO care about what your end-users think. So, thanks again for your reply, and I hope that maybe you can get someone at Google (if there really are anything other than bots there) to consider my input above.
Best of luck in your enterprise!
Frank
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We’ve received comments that were much more abrasive than Frank’s, but always do our best to respond with care. At worst, they just never get back to us. At best, we gain some friends to visit if we’re ever in Denmark or Greece.
As designers (whether designing a website, a business or a menu) it’s important to consider that even if We Can’t Please Everybody, it still helps to care about everybody.