Ever wonder how bland, feature barren, largely useless lowest common denominator shit that nobody really seems to like, or identify with can come to dominate de

Ever wonder how bland, feature barren, largely useless lowest common denominator shit that nobody really seems to like, or identify with can come to dominate design of software products? My theory is that the assumption there is some kind of meaningful "Average user" which a product is then built for ultimately destroys utility in software. If you have 50 features that on average 1% of people use, you can easily reach the false conclusion nobody cares about these features, when on aggregate 90% might use at least one of those features. Thus in aiming for the average, you haven't designed for anyone at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy Combine this with the fact that metrics can't truly tell you why something is, only that things somehow appear to have a relation. Developers love love to run wild with a narrative about how their particular reading of why the metrics shook out this way is unchallengable fact, backed by DATA (when its really exactly the opposite, you drew a conclusion based on relations you assumed to exist), you have a recipe for some really horrible misdesigning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging I think modern application design is completely off the rails, driven by statistical phantoms that are assigned significance in an arbitrary and non-systematic way and its leading to software that is genuinely a degraded experience for the user, wearing the mask of something that is propped up as "objectively better".