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But if you're not gonna ship it to all your millions of users and receive the outrage as feedback, how will you ever know if it works or not? A/B testing to a
by Rinzler89 2y ago
But if you're not gonna ship it to all your millions of users and receive the outrage as feedback, how will you ever know if it works or not?
A/B testing to a few users only works in web-app front-ends, not in professional tools where all single end-user releases need to look and act exactly the same.
Shipping to only a handful of users wasn't a thing in the era of "Gold CD" releases, and even in the era of the internet updates, nobody will want to take part in A/B testing and end up with a different Photoshop UX than what his colleague is using, so you either ship to all or none.
So it seems Photoshop's UI is more of a cause of inertia and resistance to change, rather than nailing right the first time.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoA/B testing does very little to improve any UX. It's got merits in performance optimization, where the implementation differs but the contract is static between A and B, but with user interfaces, it generally leads to pessimizations as usage is not proportional to usefulness. The rare exception is single-purpose interfaces where increasing one singular interaction is an end in itself, e.g. a marketing page, but that's a pretty unique case that is very far removed from a productivity tool.
- Dylan16807 2y agoYou bring in testers and UI experts, and you have the experts watch the testers. Shipping to mass market is a bad way to get feedback.
- Karunamon 2y agoAre there such a thing as UI experts anymore? It seems like we only have designers left, and I am none too thrilled about their influence.