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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5424778" data-attributes="member: 177">Oh, that's simple - because having a ton of information is not useful if it is bad information.  Using information that is biased, incorrect, or just of the wrong type can harm your decisions.  And, having the information is not helpful if you don't use it properly.  The people on internet forums are usually easily demonstrated to be a non-representative sample of your customers.  Thus, the information from forums is apt to be biased.Also, it is known (and easily demonstrable) that a user with a complaint frequently doesn't tell you what their problem is - they tell you what their proposed solution is.  If you follow that information blindly you make changes in your product without understanding the actual problem, which generally leads you into trouble.Now, there are folks who are skilled at the art of weeding through information from customers, and plucking out the useful data, and feeding that into the design process in a constructive way.  However, those people usually aren't designers - they are product managers and business analysts.  You'll occasionally find a designer who is also a capable analyst, but generally speaking, the skill sets are different, so they're different people.So, it may be that the company should have someone looking at forums, but that person probably shouldn't be a designer.</blockquote>