Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing applications have shown just how important the customer is to the development cycle. Most crowdsourced products have benefited at some point during the process with buyer feedback, but mostly it’s done as a side effect of the pitch and purchase activity. Now a new application hopes to make customer requests a core part of the equation to help improve products directly.

Pvsh is billed as a ‘platform for creating feature requests’, which means it offers product fans a forum to request improvements or new features for their favorite products. Now this kind of service, while initially sounding like a great idea, could also be a real waste of time, because as everyone knows, one man’s ideal feature is another man’s waste of time and money.

However the real potential for this kind of application doesn’t lie in the specific requests, but in the overall data. If enough people request a feature, then there’s clearly something lacking in a product, which designers would be foolish to ignore. We can also see this being a great service for small companies which don’t have large market research budgets, but who are keen to find out how to improve Version 2.0 etc.

At the moment it’s very early days, and the site solicits anonymous requests rather than forcing people to sign up, which is a good idea to help get traction. There’s a comments section and you can also elect to follow a product request once you’re registered and logged on to the site. We also like the ability to search for companies and individual products to see if you can add something.

There are still one or two technical glitches on the site, but overall we really like the idea. We can see a real community springing up based around a cool user reputation system and increased input from brand managers on the other side of the table. One to watch.