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> Telemetry is, by now, a fundamental part of the engineering process. Products that don't incorporate it are going to be clobbered by products that do. I am n

> Telemetry is, by now, a fundamental part of the engineering process. Products that don't incorporate it are going to be clobbered by products that do. I am not sure this is correct. Telemetry can show what users do but it won't show why they do it. Users don't click the button: maybe they don't need it but maybe they don't understand what it does. Or maybe there are too many buttons and users get lost. Also making a decision based on telemetry is making a desicion based on opinion of non-experts. There is a quote by Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”. Can you make something innovative this way? For example if we take a code editor like Sublime Text which in my opinion has very good UI, and it has no toolbar - can you use telemetry as an argument for removing a toolbar? No, because if there is a toolbar, there will be users who would use it without realising that they could do better without it. You need an expert to make better UI, not telemetry.

swsieber 9y ago
I think it would be inaccurate to say you can't learn things from telemetry. You can easily run A/B tests, or even in the absence of proper A/B tests, you can see if a newly added feature is actually being used or not. The other thing one is the timing of action - I bet you could learn a lot from that, especially if you take a nice group of people, watch and quiz them, line up your learnings with the telemetry, and then use the telemetry of your general user base to infer how your user base is responding. Standard flame-war prevention disclaimer: I'm not saying we should add telemetry to everything. I'm just saying it seems like it could be another useful tool in product creation.
shawnz 9y ago
Where does the parent claim that telemetry is the only factor you should be basing your decisions on?
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swsieber 9y ago

I think it would be inaccurate to say you can't learn things from telemetry. You can easily run A/B tests, or even in the absence of proper A/B tests, you can see if a newly added feature is actually being used or not. The other thing one is the timing of action - I bet you could learn a lot from that, especially if you take a nice group of people, watch and quiz them, line up your learnings with the telemetry, and then use the telemetry of your general user base to infer how your user base is responding. Standard flame-war prevention disclaimer: I'm not saying we should add telemetry to everything. I'm just saying it seems like it could be another useful tool in product creation.

shawnz 9y ago

Where does the parent claim that telemetry is the only factor you should be basing your decisions on?

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