If you haven’t see Steve Yegge’s rant about Google, which was meant to be internal for Google, you can read about it (with the full text) at: Google Engineer Accidentally Posts Rant About Google+.
Todd Wasserman reports:
Yegge went on to write, “Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: ‘Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let’s go contract someone to, um, write some games for us.’ Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.” (emphasis added)
That’s doable, the history of marketing in the 20th century has made that very clear. See Selling Blue Elephants.
What doesn’t work is for very talented programmers, academics, do-gooders, etc., to sit around in conference rooms to plan what other people ought to want.
What or should I say who is missing from the conference room?
Oh, yeah, the people we want to use or even pay for the service. Opps!
You may have guessed/predicted where this is going: The same is true for interfaces, computer or otherwise.
Successful interfaces happen by:
- Dumb luck
- Management/developers decide on presentation/features
- Testing with users and management/developers decide on presentation/features
- Testing with users and user feedback determines presentation/features
Care to guess which one I suspect Google used? If you picked door #3, you would be correct! (Sorry, no prize.)
True enough, management/developers also being users they won’t be wrong everytime.
Question: Would you go see a doctor who wasn’t wrong everytime?
I never thought I would recommend that anyone read marketing/advertising texts but I guess there is a time and place for everything. I would rather see you doing that than to see more interfaces that hide your hard and valuable work from users.
OK, this is a bit over long, let me summarize the rule for developing both programs (in terms of capabilities) and interfaces (in terms of features):
Don’t predict what people want! Go ask them!
[…] 20th century advertising discovered that secret decades ago. See: Predicting What People Want and especially the reference to Selling Blue […]
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