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> Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of silliness. No it isn't, if a designers ideas cannot withstand a little o
by gnaritas 18y ago
> Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of silliness.
No it isn't, if a designers ideas cannot withstand a little objective scientific testing, they aren't worth using.
> Moreover, users often don't know they want something until a designer shows them they do. You can never get to those designs by testing blues and borders.
Which is the whole point of objective testing, do the design, throw it in front of real users and see how it performs next to the original design.
I think what's really going on is that more often than not, designers want what they like rather than what works best. Engineers want what works best, and Google has an engineering culture. Form does and rightfully should take a back seat to function.
- jfarmer 18y agoI think that's right, but a little overgenerous to engineers. We have our hangups, too. Say, which do you think is better, emacs or vim? Even in a data-driven environment oftentimes the argument gets pushed back from "what to do" to "what to measure."
- gnaritas 18y agoYou can't measure emacs vs vim like you can the effect of color or layout on conversion of an app. When measuring is trivial to do and results are easily seen to directly impact revenue, there's just no excuse to not do it.
- jfarmer 18y agoI agree. I'm just saying this isn't an "engineer" versus "designer" issue. Engineers have just as many "irrational" opinions as designers. Emacs vs. Vim, Ruby vs. Python, or whatever. And those things are quantifiable to some extent. Take a random sample of engineers, give them identical tasks to complete, and vary the editor.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- shard 18y agoFrom the way I understood it, he was suggesting that testing for shades of blue and border thickness is nitpicking. An equivalent nitpick more familiar to us would be testing whether using tabs or spaces for code indenting improves coding efficiency.
- gnaritas 18y agoIf it affects conversion, then it's not nitpicking, tabs vs spaces isn't a valid comparison because it can't be so easily measured.