[thephyber]

This reply doesn’t apply to the article, at least not the way you think it does.

(1) The article is talking about how dissatisfying 2% of your market is not a small issue. And the 2% of the market the website dissatisfies are unable to express the feedback reliably.

You are talking about cooking in the same room/ship as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to learn about and fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which you may never know about so it may never get addressed.

(2) In my experience, each complex feature is its own circle in a not-perfectly-overlapping Venn diagram, so the 2% compounds and far more than 2% of your customers suffer failure from any one of the failures. This is more analogous to each ingredient in the food you select has a 98% chance of working and each dining utensil has a 98% chance of working for that meal.

(3) you are playing sleight of hand with that 5% figure. Your 5% are self-selecting people and highly affluent. This is a very narrow niche of the market and the attitude you take of “you can’t please everyone” doesn’t really work when our target customer is used to getting exactly what they want and you depend on repeat business from a small pool of customers.

(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a fundamentally different argument than the article. You simply worked in a field where mistakes are far more visible/obvious and the feedback cycle is faster so you learn not to make the same mistake (or people stop trusting you with their meals).

If instead of looking at the 98% figure in the article and thinking “I can’t please 100% of people”, but instead consider “what happens to my customer satisfaction if I move that slider up a little and what else happens if I move it up a lot?” You might actually learn something.

[dataviz1000]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

I would make the argument that people would have to weigh the cost of being accessible to the last 2% vs the cost of losing the last 2%.

Anyone who delivers mail to rural farmers 100 years ago would lose money. There are 3 options. 1. If farmers want mail, they can pay the extra costs. 2. Force, by law, mail carriers to deliver at a loss to farmers. 3. Rural Free Delivery, the government taxes everyone and pays for the free delivery to farmers.

Although almost all farmers in the United States and a majority of users on Hacker News would disagree with me, the answer is the government should continue to deliver free mail to rural farmers. The collective benefit outweighs the cost.

[thephyber]

I agree to the extent that this is about tradeoffs, hence my last paragraph about “moving the slider”.

USPS makes people who live too far off their normal routes (and presumably the homeless) use PO Boxes to receive their deliveries. That seems equivalent to the website owner using “graceful degradation” for those website features that 2% of browser users can’t use. The article is about website owners who don’t know or bother to use graceful degradation.

Yes, obviously each website owner has to make their own choices about cost/benefit. Except in practice, each product manager doesn’t actually know the cost or benefit of each feature they choose to use which doesn’t have 100% browser compatibility. It’s worth the occasional discussion to highlight these issues, hence the article.

[thephyber]

Also, FWIW I couldn’t get delivery to my residence when I lived in a ski resort town. I was forced to use a PO Box, which put the burden of the last mile on the user and took that burden off of the postal service. I’m guessing lots of farmers who don’t live on main roads/routes have to similarly use PO Boxes.

[spiffytech]

Why would farmers disagree?

[DonnieP]

Based on the results of US elections in the past 30 years, farmers (as represented by rural voters in general) do not vote for candidates who support "collective benefit."

[ipaddr]

Sure they do they create co-operatives and pool resources together. They created banks, insurance that serve their needs. Farmers aren't some lone wolf. Farmers created universal health care in other countries like Canada.

They don't support the left and social politics of pushing trans, gay, racial, feminist policies. They believe in God and Christian values.

They work hard and expect others to and don't support a welfare state but that's different from collective benefits.

[AlexeyBelov]

Yes, they've been told to fear "gay policies", whatever that actually means. Judging by the results, it's fair to say they are by and large uneducated -- except in their very narrow domain.