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There is. But one has to remember Egan's law[0] - it all has to add up to normality. Yes, there's an error term - frequently self-reported motivations and reality don't align. Reasons include people not understanding their motivations well, not being clear about weights of different motivations in them, or refusing to reveal either to researcher[1][2]. But it has to add up to normality. If I say I like your app, then you either you believe me, or assume that I'm wrong - which is not just disrespectful and patronizing in this context, but also either implies that either I in particular am crazy, or it invalidates the very idea of human emotions communicating anything. And most importantly, even if my self-reporting isn't accurate, you don't know better, and telemetry won't tell you. If I say that I didn't press this button because it was red, you can doubt the accuracy of my report, but you don't get to conclude that my real reason was that the button was square and not round, or that it was on the left and not on the right. Or that the button is useless. Telemetry will only tell you I don't press it. Or perhaps you can run an A/B test to learn that I press the button when it's blue and round and on the right side (but you may miss the fact that I pressed it out of confusion, and reverted its effects three screens down the line). Software developers are no different than real people, except that they have much more experience with computers - which means both familiarity with the UI and the ability to instinctively form a mental model of what's happening underneath, which sometimes leads us to intuitively avoid doing things that would break the application :). -- [0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Egan%27s_law [1] - Plenty of motivations could be embarrassing, or weird. E.g. for a long time, I avoided using GNOME desktop and related software, simply because I had a visceral revulsion towards their logo, which featured a footprint. It's a kind of motivation that did affect me, but I wouldn't be too willing to reveal unless asked directly. [2] - Also people sometimes report on motivations behind what they want to do, but not on the incentive conflict they're facing, and they then proceed to do something you wouldn't expect. This leads to silly arguments like "something is good because of revealed preferences", which latch on the difference between expressed preferences and observed behavior, completely ignornig the fact that observed behavior is heavily incentivized, essentially making people go against their preferences. |