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by cortesoft 2306 days ago
How? In surveys? No one does those.

Plus, people often don't give valuable feedback when asked questions about features they want and use... people are poor judges of what they actually want, and will list things they think they care about and then end up never using or which don't affect their choices.
3 comments
reaperducer 2306 days ago
In surveys? No one does those.

We do. We have real customers do real surveys of our real web sites. In person. We even do shadowing to see how real people use our sites in their daily work.

It's uncommon in SV due to laziness and an unwillingness to talk to actual human beings. Which is dumb because there are companies that will handle this for you.

But SV is stuck in this mindset that everything can be solved by an algorithm. It can't. The tech echo chamber really needs to get over itself.

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Silhouette 2306 days ago
How? In surveys? No one does those.

Our customers certainly do. We get excellent results from asking a few simple questions now and then, providing both a good source actionable feedback on feature requests and any current problems, and often some encouraging comments that reassure us we are basically doing things that our customers like.

It doesn't just have to be surveys with lots of participants, though. For example, we've known for decades that a simple observational study with just a handful of people is often enough to identify most of the serious usability problems with an interface.

The idea that everything important must be reduced to automated analytics and number-crunching is a very strange disease. Even if the numbers don't lie -- and as we see here, that is far from guaranteed -- you still need to be asking the right questions and comparing useful alternatives for the results to be valuable.

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Jach 2305 days ago
"...someone recently explained to me how great it is that, instead of using data to make decisions, we use political connections, and that the idea of making decisions based on data is a myth anyway; no one does that." -- from https://danluu.com/wat/

Sorry, your comment just reminded me of that. Are surveys perfect? No, but they have their uses, and plenty of companies find real value by making use of them.

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