[jw887c]

My favorite flaw of averages isn't even mentioned in this article. It's the aggregation of averages across covariates. The more covariates (higher dimensions) your problem has, the less likely the population will exist "in the average".

This was explored in a famous study of Air Force pilots and when measuring across 10 different dimensions, found that 0 pilots were "average" across all 10.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

>There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.

edit: wrong link

[flohofwoe]

You had the wrong link in your clipboard ;)

It's probably this one?

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

(PS: this is my favourite pet theory why UX is such a trainwreck these days, UIs are designed for an "average user" that doesn't exist, driven by "telemetry averages")

[kwhitefoot]

User interfaces should be designed for the users you will have in the long run. In industry and commerce these will be expert users.

I spent a large chunk of my life writing software to design transformers. The UIs broke all of the naive 'rules' about UI design and were crammed full of information, buttons, boxes, entry fields, pull down lists, etc.

For the users they were designed for they were very productive. For a casual or first time user they were impossible to use. But we had no casual users, only experts who were in a hurry and would not tolerate having to wade through multiple screens to perform some small what-if exercise. It was like an airliner cockpit, everything as close to hand as possible and only the rarely used items on other pages.

A frequent request was to enlarge the window so that more could be fitted in at once, it was much rarer to be asked to move something off the main window.

[bthallplz]

You linked to the OP by mistake. Please share the article you were referring to!