2024-12-26 00:41 UTC When complaints are a good sign
When you build something, you have to pick some design goals and priorities. Ideally you do so explicitly, but even if you don't, you're still implicitly doing so based on your design choices.
These choices are trade-offs. If you want to write a quiet song, it won't be loud. If you are writing a software tool and you want to prioritize speed over simplicity, then it won't be as simple as if you'd prioritized simplicity over speed.
There are two main signs that you've succeeded at your goals. The first, and more pleasant, is that you get compliments about how your thing is like you wanted it to be. "I love that song, it's so quiet!" "Your tool is so fast!" Why thank you, that's exactly what I was going for.
The second sign, though, is that you will get complaints. Specifically, people will complain that your thing does not achieve the things you didn't set out to achieve. "I wish this song was louder", "this tool is so hard to use". That you are receiving complaints at all means that people are aware of your creation; that they are complaining about what you specifically set out to make a non-goal is a side-effect of the fact that you made that trade-off.
The worst thing to do, when you receive such complaints, is take them to heart and try to fix them. This is because by definition you wanted these complaints. They are a sign that the thing you built is built as you wanted to build it. The people complaining want something different, they don't want your thing. It's just that your thing is so good that it's the thing they're compelled towards even though it doesn't prioritize the things they care about most.
If you try to fix these complaints, you will, again by definition, be compromising on your goals. If you make the song have a loud part, then it's no longer a quiet song. You wanted a quiet song. Now it's a song that's quiet in parts and loud in parts. It probably still doesn't satisfy the needs of the people who want a loud song, and now it also doesn't satisfy the needs of the people who wanted your original quiet song. If you make your tool easier to use by compromising on the speed, then now you have a tool that's both not as fast as it could be and not as usable as it could have been if you'd started with that as a goal.
It's important, therefore, to separate out complaints into those that are complaints you expect based on your design goals (which you should acknowledge but not fix), vs complaints that are either orthogonal to your goals (which you can fix without compromising your goals), or that are in line with your goals (which you should prioritize, since that's what you said to yourself was most important in the first place).