John Welch pointed out an article from Justin Williams, an independent Mac/iOS developer, about how ‘Useless’ Is a Loaded Word.  Williams opens up with this:

Here is a tip for all the non-developers out there. When you email your favorite developer with a feature request or bug report never, ever, ever use the word useless to describe their product. Useless is kryptonite to developers and puts us on the defensive instantly.

I cannot disagree enough with this assertion.  Feedback is love.  Your user, or at least a potential user, took the time out of their day to write to you to tell you something that you could do that might help you win their time, their loyalty, and their money.  Feedback is a gift, a priceless gift.  The wrapping paper might be an unattractive shade of brown, but the gift inside is one that you should never ignore.

People use hyperbole.  They’re prone to using it when excited or upset.  People are most likely to offer feedback when they’re excited or upset.  As a result, you’re likely to that hyperbole in action when you receive unsolicited feedback.  Yes, they’re probably using loaded words.  But those loaded words matter.

When you get any piece of feedback, you’ve got to figure out what to do about it.  Marco Arment said this:

If you call my app “useless”, I stop reading right there and either hit Delete or keep scrolling.

Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your decision.  Making decisions about your applications based solely on an emotional response might not be the right way to go about it, but everyone gets to do their own thing.  Instead, I think you should step back a bit and try to determine what’s caused such a response.  It behooves you to do this for both positive hyperbole (“OMG YOUR APP IS THE BEST APP EVAR!!!!!!”) and negative hyperbole (“OMG YOUR APP KILLS USELESS KITTENS DEAD!!!!!!!”).  This isn’t to say that you’ll necessarily act on the feedback, but you do need to at least understand it.

Determining what gift is hidden behind that ugly brown wrapping paper is a hard-won skill.  It’s not about “developing a thicker skin”.  It’s about learning how to hear what someone is really saying, not just the words that are coming out of their mouth.  In fact, Williams himself says nearly the same thing in another post about edge cases:

Any developer worth his salt hears about [edge case] issues like this and their skin starts to crawl.

Yes!  That’s it, right there!  You hear someone describe an issue, and your skin crawls because you know that there’s something more going on than what they’re saying.  So you take the time to consider what their feedback indicates about your application, and you decide what to do about it.  Of course, Williams had said earlier in that post that his “nerd ego” had been boosted a bit, which makes it psychologically easier to try to tease apart the feedback to determine if there’s something to be done.

It’s tempting to only listen to the feedback that tells you what you want to hear, or is offered without any kind of (real or perceived) judgement.  Don’t just pay attention to what your nerd ego wants to hear.  Listen to it all.  Accept the love, accept the hate, and continue striving to make your apps better based on what you learn from both the lovers and the haters.