Your user group has stopped raising anything substantial. They worked out something you did not tell them.
Every implementation has three kinds of decision at any moment. Closed ones, taken and not revisitable without a cost the organisation will not accept. Constrained ones, open within limits set by an architecture, a regulation or a product. And open ones, genuinely undetermined.
The third category is where user involvement produces value. It is smaller than most projects imagine and larger than most users are told.
A group told that the data model is fixed and the exception handling is genuinely open will work on the exception handling. A group left to discover the boundary by having its suggestions declined one at a time will conclude the whole exercise is decorative, and the good people stop attending.
The cost is not the frustration. It is that the areas which were genuinely open go to build unexamined, because nobody knew that was where their time was worth something.
Writing down the decision space costs an afternoon, and it is the difference between consultation and evidence.
Built to Be Used, chapter 11.
#Cocreation #UserResearch #ProductManagement
This article accompanies the book Built to Be Used.