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0 pointsjancsika7y ago0 comments

> I've ever used. Someone that has no clue what the users are doing makes a decision about how best to design an app that they don't even know how to test.

You're talking at cross-purposes.

To get a sense of how people are interacting with the software you have to watch them interact with the software. The moment you ask them a question about UX you'll begin to get low quality input that you can't trust:

* user is expressing an exaggerated desire for some esoteric feature that nobody else would use or discover

* user is repeating what they think should be decent design

* user is agreeing with a criticism they don't understand because they want to appear knowledgeable

All of those and many other problems go away when you just watch somebody use an interface.

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TeMPOraL7y ago

Watching someone use an interface can be low-quality information, especially when that interface is already heavily optimized to guide the user down a prescribed path. If that's your sole input, then you're essentially doing a naïve gradient descent, and you're bound to be stuck in a local minimum.

Asking users, in addition to watching them struggle, can inform you on what they're actually trying to achieve, and what's their mental model.

jrochkind17y ago

I do try to avoid getting them to tell me _solutions_ though.

"What's the most annoying part of your job with this software" (with followup questions to understand why and what they were trying to do and _why_ they were trying to do it) is better than "What feature do you want that would most make this software less annoying"?

TeMPOraL7y ago

This I can agree with, but with a caveat: if you're dealing with professional domain and users who are domain experts, it might be worth it to pick their brains about features too. They might have used other software in the past, and know a design element or functionality that works better.

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TeMPOraL7y ago

Asking users, in addition to watching them struggle, can inform you on what they're actually trying to achieve, and what's their mental model.

jrochkind17y ago

I do try to avoid getting them to tell me _solutions_ though.

TeMPOraL7y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse