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"Listening to your users" is just a more manual form of data gathering though. Also, it's not like "hearing what you want to hear" has been invented by statisti

by WJW 5y ago

"Listening to your users" is just a more manual form of data gathering though. Also, it's not like "hearing what you want to hear" has been invented by statisticians, that is super easy to do when talking to users as well. Some of the problems in talking to users: - people will often tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. (Very few users would ever tell an interviewing dev that they think the product is unsalvageable, the dev team wasted several months and that the user would never ever use it) - Users often don't know what they want because they don't understand the full range of possibilities. Sometimes they dream of tech that would violate several laws of physics, at other times they fail to realize that for-loops exist and just ask for a faster way to manually click a button a thousand times. - Fads affect users just as much as anyone else. If there has been a surge of news articles about how Google is doing fancy AI stuff, you can bet the bakery on the corner of the street will mention machine learning when asked what they want to improve their business.

JohnFen 5y ago
"Listening to your users" is a voluntary exchange with your users, not compelling data from them. The difference between the two is critical.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  It’s amazing how far the goalposts have moved on analytical data. I worked retail in The Time Before The Web and we collected and analyzed data from our customers. We had a door clicker to give us a daily record of traffic. We did detailed analytics on what items customers bought when, to inform inventory and staffing decisions. We did regular people-counting studies to evaluate our merchandising in different parts of the store. We did coupons in local papers for which we could directly track redemption. This was all in the service of making the store work better for our customers. Now, you might say that those are all anonymous aggregate piles of data. Well, so are most web analytics packages, including many client-side JavaScript.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    No goalposts have moved. The difference between the two is that there's no question that counting heads walking through a door and watching inventory patterns are not personal to the customer. With telemetry, including web analytics, there is always a question because there is no visibility as to their actual practices. It all amounts to "trust us". And we've had more than enough experience with these things to know that such trust is frequently misplaced -- so none of it can be trusted. And GA especially cannot be trusted, and also happens to be pretty much ubiquitous. As a side note, it's become just as dangerous to be in a physical store as online now. People who prefer not to be spied on must pay in cash, be sure to put their phones into airplane mode before entering the store, and so forth. And with the increasing adoption of face recognition in stores, it becomes risky to even show your face. In other words, they have to be as "on guard" in the store as online.

by WJW 5y ago

JohnFen 5y ago

"Listening to your users" is a voluntary exchange with your users, not compelling data from them. The difference between the two is critical.

snowwrestler 5y ago
It’s amazing how far the goalposts have moved on analytical data. I worked retail in The Time Before The Web and we collected and analyzed data from our customers. We had a door clicker to give us a daily record of traffic. We did detailed analytics on what items customers bought when, to inform inventory and staffing decisions. We did regular people-counting studies to evaluate our merchandising in different parts of the store. We did coupons in local papers for which we could directly track redemption. This was all in the service of making the store work better for our customers. Now, you might say that those are all anonymous aggregate piles of data. Well, so are most web analytics packages, including many client-side JavaScript.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  No goalposts have moved. The difference between the two is that there's no question that counting heads walking through a door and watching inventory patterns are not personal to the customer. With telemetry, including web analytics, there is always a question because there is no visibility as to their actual practices. It all amounts to "trust us". And we've had more than enough experience with these things to know that such trust is frequently misplaced -- so none of it can be trusted. And GA especially cannot be trusted, and also happens to be pretty much ubiquitous. As a side note, it's become just as dangerous to be in a physical store as online now. People who prefer not to be spied on must pay in cash, be sure to put their phones into airplane mode before entering the store, and so forth. And with the increasing adoption of face recognition in stores, it becomes risky to even show your face. In other words, they have to be as "on guard" in the store as online.