

Don't Do What Your Users Say - Harkins
http://blog.hanfordlemoore.com/2007/04/16/dont-do-what-your-users-say

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KirinDave
This is a great article, and it re-iterates something I've seen time and time
again in website usability tests: People aren't stupid, they're just bad at
expressing their desires. Generally a feature request has a good basis, but
the proposed feature may not be the best solution.

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johns
Exactly. Listen to user's problems, not their solutions.

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IsaacSchlueter
It's not just that users aren't good at expressing their desires. They're not
good at _knowing_ their desires.

Look at what users do, not what they say. Good metrics and a little cleverness
is usually better than any sort of feature request form.

edit: Hackers are not exceptions to this rule.

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brlewis
I've seen this principle presented before (thanks paul), but I appreciate how
a concrete example like the one in this article really makes it clear.

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sh1mmer
I think one key takeaway of this article is also that a comments form is not
the same as doing user testing.

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raganwald
...or as an old-school Mac developer once put it to me: _Get in your time
machine and go back to 1982. Now take a survey: How many people ask for bit-
mapped graphics and a mouse?_

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srinigAuto
This is a great observation. Part of the reason for this behavior is almost
all the people I've met who tout usability tests come from the old school
market research/focus group approaches. Put people in a room and listen to
what they talk. I've experienced this first hand. I've even put up mock print
screens of the click flow and inevitably there is a disjoint. That does not
work - the only reliable way is to put the actual working app out there and
observe them use it. OBSERVE the users (with the UI guy in room) and
correlate/validate what you see with objective page abandonment/scenario data
on Google Analytics. Its a little bit of work but I think it totally completes
the picture. Excellent observations.

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icco
For some reason this article reminded me of this old TV segment that was
hosted by the Genie from Aladdin. The title was "Great minds think for
themselves." The title always stuck with me (along with apples "think
differently" slogan) in that no one thinks the same. A group of people may
approach a problem the same way, but there will never be one true way of doing
something. This is why I think it's important to get external feedback from
people totally unrelated to you. Sure it can be painful, but feedback almost
always helps, I mean heck it's the entire philosophy behind web2.0.

Anyway great article and great responses here.

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mikeryan
Of course Jakob Nielson said this first quite some time ago.

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html>

