yes one of the most frustrating things is to deal with people who come in and ask for data to support an idea. You suddenly have to justify common sense and goo

yes one of the most frustrating things is to deal with people who come in and ask for data to support an idea. You suddenly have to justify common sense and good ideas to people who don't have any data for their ideas either but they'll certainly push their ideas first before any data has landed. After all you have to develop something, you can't just do nothing. And then later you do a survey on what they ended up doing without any data and naturally the thing that was visible got selected. People very rarely look at something and say: "well this entire product you developed is just garbage." Take the netflix ui for example, I'm sure they did plenty of surveys. Or the Google+ ui or the Windows Metro Phone. And yet it's not human to expect the surveyed to say that this is all bad and redesign it all from the ground up. A human being when asked for specifics will give specifics of some kind and then they will fix those specifics and think that it's all better now. I mean it's all absurd. Knowing what feature or design to implement is not really easy to do based on data. By the time you can gather data you already had to implement designs, ideas etc to a quite advanced degree. Data is very useful but it certainly can't be used for new product or feature development until you already developed them. At which point the data is already old and you have to make decisions about the future again.