
“They would have said faster horses” – An example of asking wrong questions - artembugara
https://codarium.substack.com/p/they-would-have-said-faster-horses
======
btschaegg
There is a quote by Don Norman on the matter that I like very much (from "The
Design of Everyday Things"):

> Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements
> produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements
> are developed by watching people in their natural environment.

~~~
bob1029
In my experience, requirements are never fully developed until after many
iterations have been undertaken.

You can never perfectly plan how an application or any other arbitrary
convenience should be in isolation of the user. You can certainly get very
close, but there is something about actually using a thing that cannot ever be
fully simulated in an authentic way. The way a knob feels to a person is not a
thing you can ever truly encapsulate and store in a database field.

Constant feedback and iterating on that feedback is how you arrive at ideal
outcomes. The art of developing software or other high-quality user
experiences is a very iterative, chicken-egg-style problem. It is a human
problem. Being prepared to throw it all away and start over each time you
iterate is one of the most powerful things you could ever hope to do. Just
keep a copy of what you tried before as a stick to lean on. Each time you
iterate, that stick should be getting stronger. Eventually you wind up with a
bunch of sticks and you can start to chop them up, reorganize them, and build
a proper structure.

------
OldHand2018
> No one could think about cars at that time. Correct.

Ford Motor Company was Henry Ford's 3rd car company, and by that time there
were probably 15+ car companies in Detroit alone.

As a curious aside, his second car company is still around too. He left after
serious disputes with his financial backers; they decided to liquidate the
company and brought another experienced Detroit engineer in to do so, but he
recognized the value and convinced them to continue, renaming it the Cadillac
Automobile Company.

------
csours
Stated another way: Listen to your customers, but don't feel obligated to do
exactly what they say.

> Just ask “What is your top problem?”

People will answer this question in the form of imagined solutions or
improvements to existing systems, so it's not a matter of simply asking a
different question, it's a matter of digging into the answers and needs.

~~~
jvreagan
Jeff Bezos says this exact thing in a slightly different way: "If you don't
listen to your customers, you will fail. If you only listen to your customers,
you will fail."

------
nemosaltat
> P.S. This article is not GPT-3 generated

This stands out to me. When I frequented reddit, folks would often preface a
post with some sort of pre-apology about their English. Now, when I read
articles with strange grammatical features, my first thought is “what are the
chances this was generated.”

Recent Personal Anecdote: While struggling to get OS X to run in a VM, on AMD
architecture I came across several unattributed guides with informative,
topical content where the language was just a little “off.” It occurred to me
that they might be ESL or translated, but none had any attribution. For some
reason it finally struck me as odd that such detailed, technical guides
wouldn’t mention an author or at least acknowledge “The team at
xyzWebCollaboritive.”

Several guides under the same domain name contained relavent information on my
very specific search topic, with langue that was “uncannily” askew.

Is this just me?

~~~
chernov
Google simply generates the guides on demand and throws a link somewhere in
the search results for you :)

------
catchmeifyoucan
Faster horses is still a challenge for solutions that aren't always obvious to
people. A vision isn't always the one the customer wants. An obvious solution
isn't always the best either. One way I found to help overcome this barrier is
testing for symptoms based on assumptions about your new feature set and what
you aim to solve:

Cars have wheels. Okay,tell me about your problems with horses and the way
they move?

Cars don't need rest. Okay, tell me about your problems with stopping to feed
your horses?

Cars are faster. Okay, walk me through a time when you were late to something
- why so?

It's easy for a customer to answer all three answers separately, but they'll
struggle to put them all together and come up with "car". They've never seen
it before. However, you can still validate because their problems are very
real. When you have your concept, you can show it, and then validate the final
solution.

------
ogre_codes
I'm not sure who this blog is talking to, it feels like classic straw-man
argument. Ford never said the car wouldn't solve anyone's problem, in fact his
pitch was that the car was _better than_ a faster horse.

~~~
artembugara
Agree with you. I think this blog post is about the same.

Whatever Ford said, this quote is famous (most likely he did not say that,
btw)

~~~
ogre_codes
> Whatever Ford said, this quote is famous (most likely he did not say that,
> btw)

I just took that bit at face value, but you are right... and makes this blog
post even less palatable.

------
chongli
This is also known as the XY-problem [1]. People want a solution to X, and
they think Y is the way to solve it. But they’re having trouble doing Y and so
they ask for help with Y.

The problem is that Y is not the best way to solve X and you’re confused about
why they’d ever want to do Y. Life would be much easier if they had just asked
for help solving X.

[1]
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378)

~~~
detaro
Is there a name for the reverse, when Stack Overflow assumes you don't
understand your constraints and propose all possible solutions to what they
think is X that aren't a solution to Y?

~~~
klavinski
It has been called the YX problem a few times on HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23599250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23599250)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842747)

------
HugoDaniel
love the ending about not being gpt3 generated :) nice touch

~~~
jameslk
I have this fear I'm reading GPT-3 produced text now whenever I read an
article or comment that seems to lack a lot of context or goes off on weird
tangents. It's a unique feeling, similar to experiencing gaslighting or the
uncanny valley of text. I think this new phenomenon needs a name

~~~
fultonfaknem42
Confusion. You're experiencing confusion.

I get the exact same thing.

------
foxyv
As a person who has ridden horses I would say horses that don't poop. After
that, horses that don't throw you randomly, need constant vet checkups, make
tons of dust, smell funny, or bite. Far in the distant horizon of the problems
with horses is speed.

------
catalogia
Here's my problem with that quote: it comes from the same man who also said _"
Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is
black."_

Considering that context, I view his horses quote as another expression of his
contempt for what other people want, even when they want something reasonable.

Also, Henry Ford did not invent the car. Cars existed before he mass produced
them; had he asked people what they wanted, people probably would have said _"
a car I can afford"_ not _" a faster horse."_

~~~
parsimo2010
Here's my problem with people that have heard a few popular quotes and think
they understand the whole story: for the first several years the Model T came
in several different colors. It switched to black only because of demand, then
eventually they went back to offering multiple colors when they could.

Ford only switched to making black cars only when the demand was so high that
the production lines couldn't keep up. It wasn't contempt for the customer
that made him do it, his choice was either to streamline the production
process or to raise prices so that demand would drop. The selling point of his
cars were that the common man could afford them, not that they were colorful.
He made an appropriate business choice, not some user-hostile choice.

~~~
apostacy
But I think that quote is usually invoked by people when they blatantly
disregard the wishes of their customers.

It's just a way to justify "screw the users, they have no idea what they want,
I know what they want, because I'm a genius like Henry Ford, and my users are
stupid."

I heard that Steve Jobs was fond if saying that. And sure, Steve Jobs had a
lot of success, but people don't remember his failures as much. Steve Jobs was
responsible for the Apple III, a fiasco for Apple computers because Jobs
insisted on not having fans in it.

He was adamant that the era of fans in computers was over, and the Apple III
was a disaster that kept overheating. I am sure that when engineers tried
talking Jobs into reconsidering, they just gave them that Henry Ford platitude
and dismissed them.

I have heard so many times disastrously unpopular UX redesigns and dark
patterns were justified with pigheaded platitudes about how stupid users are.

So regardless of what Henry Ford himself actually meant at the time, the
perception today is that it was justification for disregarding customers.

