
Most software companies ignore user behavior - mrbbk
https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-08-26-a-most-software-companies
======
gumby
Not just software developers. I was working on a medical device and visited
doctors' offices to see how and where they stored their medication (e.g. for
how could we make our dispenser more prominent without getting in the way?).
We also filmed our investigators holding various prototype devices to see how
they picked them up, how they were balanced, how they felt in small and large
hands etc.

Universally we were told that nobody had ever asked them anything like that
before.

~~~
taneq
I've never understood how people can design and build anything (software,
hardware, whatever) without understanding how it's used. Dogfooding is great
(and so many places don't even do that!) but you don't really know what you
need to build until you sit down with your users and actually watch them work.

~~~
kwhitefoot
It's really difficult to understand how a large complicated appplication
should be used if you have no use for it yourself. I spent most of the last
twenty years workin g on design software for transformers (the electrical kind
not the newly fashionabloe machine learning stuff) but I have never designed a
transformer in my life. There is no way of dogfooding such a product the
developers have no use for it at all.

So we do our best, observe the users, try to provide shortcuts and hints. But
watching a user work is really difficult too because in a large application
the users don't all use all of the application all of the time so getting a
realistic picture of the whole use of the program is extremely time consuming
which means expensive and the client departments just want to use it, they
very often aren't interested in optimizing it.

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hinkley
Most software developers ignore user behavior.

It was a bit of a shock for me to figure out that much of my early success in
software boiled down to a few things I was doing that nobody else was, and one
of those was watching other people work and doing something - anything - more
with that information than simply writing it down or complaining about it.
Most of those people have been coworkers, not even customers.

~~~
privateSFacct
Agreed - I credit my entire career to this. I started watching people trying
to solve problems, and then would piece together something "silly" that helped
them solve it.

Next thing I was doing a big system implementation. Then consulting.

One note - now that I'm removed from day to day and don't have time to program
myself I see how easy it is NOT to pay attention to how anyone will use
something.

I imagine this is how windows gets bloated with candy crush saga and all the
bloatware even on the "pro" versions. What employer wants this stuff on users
computers? It just clutters up menues.

~~~
reificator
I play games all the time and I don't want games preinstalled. And it's not
just that it's a casual game like Candy Crush. I don't care if it's the latest
Call of Duty or whatever you young whippersnappers play nowadays. My work PC
is for work and my gaming PC is for games I choose to download. Even if it
came with Minecraft I'd go and download the Java version instead for mod
support.

------
t0astbread
I don't doubt that this kind of invasive data collection can help developers
at some point. But as a user I'm glad that most of the software I'm using
doesn't track everything I do (or even register me as a distinct user at all).
I'm also willing to accept poorer software quality in return (which curiously,
isn't the case).

------
ABeeSea
Having worked on user data before, I think the issue is that for complex
software, it’s hard to get value/insight from this data. Imagine if you are
Microsoft and had every action every Excel user makes with office365. Where
would you even start to be able to get value out of this data?

~~~
tempguy9999
Install an accelerometer in the keyboard. When heavy impacts are detected from
someone smashing their face into it repeatedly, pop up a dialog box asking
them if there is something wrong and would they like assistance? Extensive
feedback will be forthcoming.

A bit more helpfully, MS were asked repeatedly not to fuck with the menus but
they replaced it with the ribbon. Ditto that terrible new interface that was
nothing like windows 7. They could have allowed the _choice_ of new interface
but they did not. MS got plenty of info and chose to discard it.

MS is now in a position where it doesn't need to care.

~~~
nxc18
There’s a lot of interesting history that I think this comment ignores. The
office 2007 project was one of their more heavily feedback-driven initiatives;
had they been paying attention the same way for Windows 8, it likely would
have looked a lot more like Windows 10.

Really interesting talk:
[https://youtu.be/AHiNeUTgGkk](https://youtu.be/AHiNeUTgGkk)

They had really good reasons for using the ribbon, not the least of which was
that people weren’t finding the features they needed. That was all driven by
telemetry back before it was considered the evilest of evils.

I’m amazed that you’re still bitter after 13 years. Afaict actual user
preference is strongly for the ribbon, minus a very vocal minority that were
bothered by the change. Office 2007 was in fact not the boon for OpenOffice
that was predicted.

edit: tone, realized it came across as not as respectful as I intended

~~~
dzdt
After 13 years there are still things I have trouble finding on the ribbon
that were easy with the menu. And the ribbon totally kills the menu
item->keyboard shortcut learning path to efficiently activate things you use
in your personal workflow. I am bitter about this one too!

~~~
Agenttin
I think that's the difference with a lot of these things. If you are a primary
keyboard user you tend to rage against a lot of these changes.

~~~
dzdt
That may be a good guess: people who prefer words to pictures and keyboard to
mouse would prefer menus to the ribbon. That pattern holds for me anyway. And
I would believe that word/keyboard people are in the minority, so a UI study
would identify the ribbon as superior.

------
skybrian
Hmm. No mention of privacy issues?

~~~
mrbbk
I thought about adding something about privacy, but that's sort of a different
topic for a different time. There are plenty of privacy preserving ways of
learning from this data.

~~~
compiler-guy
It's not a different topic at all. If you don't design it in from the start,
it is very hard to get right later.

------
pictur
[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-
test-w...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-
with-5-users/)

~~~
hinkley
I like some of the information in this, and unfortunately I missed the
conversation when this made it to the front page a couple weeks ago, I just
wasn't in the right headspace.

But I disagree with one of the value judgements:

> As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will
> keep seeing the same things again and again.

No! The frequency of errors is your priority list for UX fixes. You may not,
as they claim, find more errors with more than 15 people, but more data
samples gives you information about distribution and frequency of errors (do
people make this mistake once in a while or every single time?).

You might not need any of that data to make a rough priority list, or it might
be helpful for negotiating scope. It'll depend a lot on context.

~~~
marcosdumay
If you go through that site's (very long) history, you'll see their
conclusions that quantitative UX research isn't useful for single projects.

For discovering features of the population, yes, quantitative research is
great. But for making your software better, you are much better iterating
small qualitative tests.

------
petepete
Not related to the article, but on mobile I can't scroll right to see the full
table. Rather annoying.

~~~
briandoll
Ah, bummer, thanks for letting us know. We'll look into the magical CSS
incantations necessary to fit those in well on mobile. Cheers

~~~
petepete
No problem. I think

    
    
        table { 
          overflow-x: auto;
        }
    

Should do it

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PopeDotNinja
I take some comfort in the fact that as more and more data gets collected
about me, Big Sibling will be drowning in so much data that they can't
possibly make sense of it all. Eventually an nearly infinite amount of
analysis will conclude that I am boring actually as boring as was initially
estimated. That said, I'd be pleased with less monitoring of myself.

~~~
t0astbread
Reminds me of this talk[1] I've seen a while ago where an ex-NSA executive
talks about how the NSA has too much data to handle it efficiently (amongst
other things).

[1]
[https://media.ccc.de/v/SHA2017-402-how_the_nsa_tracks_you](https://media.ccc.de/v/SHA2017-402-how_the_nsa_tracks_you)

------
SkyPuncher
I'm working on an app and trying to be conscientious about my user's behavior,
but it's proving to be extremely time consuming for the value I get out.

The problem for me is I can take a relatively accurate guess and achieve 90%+
of what the user is looking for. That last 10% takes a ton of time to figure
out. For every moment I spend on the 10%, I'm only getting a fractional return
compared to simply moving onto another feature.

Maybe in the future, I'll come back and figure things out, but for now it's
just not worth my time.

~~~
sjlogan
With a few lines of code, you can integrate Segment (or a similar tool) into
your software. You can start tracking user behavior and events automatically.
Segment can then send this data onto tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude which
has built-in user activity flow analytics.

Take a look into some of these tools if you are looking for an easier way to
track user behavior.

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yoz-y
I would love to know which features of my app are used and by how many user.
But this clashes with my requirement to not have any server side service or
telemetry.

~~~
sjlogan
You can use a tool like Segment to track user activity client side. With a few
lines of code in your app / front end you can be sending user behavior and
events to Segment via their API. No custom server side service is required.

Might be worth digging into if you are interested in better user activity
tracking.

~~~
yoz-y
I'd rather not include a third party either. Then I would have to do all the
GDPR work to disclose what do they get, how do they store it and so on.
Ideally Apple would provide some framework to do basic functionality
analytics.

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JohnFen
In my view, too many software companies have adopted the horrid practices that
marketers like this guy have been inflicting on us.

We don't need more of this.

------
iamaelephant
Love to add a column to one of the most critical tables in my system every
time I add a feature. Galaxy brain stuff here.

