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My father used to hold the home button to start siri. Siri then says "hello" so my father politely says hello back. On hearing this siri turns itself off so it

My father used to hold the home button to start siri. Siri then says "hello" so my father politely says hello back. On hearing this siri turns itself off so it never hears his question and he stands there wondering why it works for other people but never him.

mhh__ 7y ago
That's a UX oversight that I can so so so imagine myself doing if given the chance. Excellent reason to test interfaces with people who've never used it before
- atoav 7y ago
  I think for most people this kind of empathy is a skill that can be learned and improved. It is very easy to forget the assumptions you make everyday. Very carefully studying how e.g. your parents use things or remembering how foreign certain parts of a computer felt to you the first times you used them are valuable excercises. This is a bit like writing novels with main figures that are very much unlike yourself: if you want to paint a convincing picture, you will have to research and figure out how people do things. And if you go deeper you need to understand where their ideas come from. It is quite sad, that many people in the tech world have a very one-dimensional collection of possible user characters. In the worst case they divide the world into people that are like them and idiots who have no idea. The only thing worse than this is not thinking about design at all.
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    Especially for a company like Apple, I think it should be less about having empathy and more about having the resources to gather bug reports and track them down. Large beta pools and other feedback mechanisms could credibly get reports like "Siri doesn't work for me" to come in. Then you have to have people to trace those down. Really? It works for me? What are the recent queries on this account? Ohhh, he's just saying hello back, then the exchange ends and Siri misses his question. How many other people have this pattern? Can we get a fix so, if the user replies with a greeting the conversation stays open? Having people getting and tracking down reports from customers will cause your organization to develop something that's a lot like empathy. You'll learn what customers have problems with and fix them.
    - atoav 7y ago
      Ofc this depends on the size of the project. But you have testers who will need to figure things out. It is not very creative to say “Hallo” to a thing that says “Hallo” to you, people do it every day. This is something that should work from day 1 and could have been avoided by one person testing it with their un-techy dad in mind. And this as you said depends on the organization, but if your product speaks to people and it doesn’t know that greeting back isn’t necesarilly the end of the conversation, you skipped conversation 101

mhh__ 7y ago

That's a UX oversight that I can so so so imagine myself doing if given the chance. Excellent reason to test interfaces with people who've never used it before

atoav 7y ago
I think for most people this kind of empathy is a skill that can be learned and improved. It is very easy to forget the assumptions you make everyday. Very carefully studying how e.g. your parents use things or remembering how foreign certain parts of a computer felt to you the first times you used them are valuable excercises. This is a bit like writing novels with main figures that are very much unlike yourself: if you want to paint a convincing picture, you will have to research and figure out how people do things. And if you go deeper you need to understand where their ideas come from. It is quite sad, that many people in the tech world have a very one-dimensional collection of possible user characters. In the worst case they divide the world into people that are like them and idiots who have no idea. The only thing worse than this is not thinking about design at all.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  Especially for a company like Apple, I think it should be less about having empathy and more about having the resources to gather bug reports and track them down. Large beta pools and other feedback mechanisms could credibly get reports like "Siri doesn't work for me" to come in. Then you have to have people to trace those down. Really? It works for me? What are the recent queries on this account? Ohhh, he's just saying hello back, then the exchange ends and Siri misses his question. How many other people have this pattern? Can we get a fix so, if the user replies with a greeting the conversation stays open? Having people getting and tracking down reports from customers will cause your organization to develop something that's a lot like empathy. You'll learn what customers have problems with and fix them.
  - atoav 7y ago
    Ofc this depends on the size of the project. But you have testers who will need to figure things out. It is not very creative to say “Hallo” to a thing that says “Hallo” to you, people do it every day. This is something that should work from day 1 and could have been avoided by one person testing it with their un-techy dad in mind. And this as you said depends on the organization, but if your product speaks to people and it doesn’t know that greeting back isn’t necesarilly the end of the conversation, you skipped conversation 101