Greetings! I’m Andy Hengel, and I’m one of the Global Product Marketing Managers in Logitech’s retail mouse business. Mice consume my time Monday thru Friday, but on the weekends there isn’t much better than finding a long, twisty road that leads to a good restaurant. Live music and skiing rank right up there too.

If I’m honest with myself, it’s pretty odd that I spend the majority of my waking hours obsessively thinking about mice (the computer variety, of course). I’m also afflicted with a trait that affects product managers everywhere. Nosiness. We love to send out surveys and hold focus groups to learn what people think about our products. We pour over Amazon reviews to see what we’re doing right and what we could improve upon. We want to know if you really do use the function keys on your keyboard or if you reassign the extra buttons on your mouse to do something other than what we thought you’d do.

To feed our obsession, we recently launched the Logitech User Experience program. Logitech mouse and keyboard users can opt into this program by installing a small application that runs for a period of 30 days. The program collects information about how you use your mouse and keyboard and sends it (anonymously) to a Logitech database.

When we first came up with this idea, it sounded great, save for the obvious question: “Won’t people be nervous about installing an application that monitors what they do with their mouse and keyboard?” So, our first requirement was to design the program to collect a limited amount of information, namely anonymous data – no names, no e-mail addresses, no passwords, etc. Nor does it capture any letters or numbers you type, or the Web pages you visit. Plus, all the data we capture is combined with that from other users, so we only look at data in aggregate.

Many people who’ve been posting comments on this blog have suggested new product ideas and improvements. If you want to help us make even better mice and keyboards, there’s no better way to help than by participating in this program. Aside from a few minutes to sign up and taking an optional survey, the program runs in the background without any noticeable impact to system performance.

The data we’ll get from this program will really help lead to better products in the future. And participating is a whole lot easier than sitting in a focus group for an hour… J