Your reasoning is detached from the outcome.
That’s a rather lofty accusation.
I worked in the software industry for years, and at a usability agency. I have relevant, real-world experience with this, and am not the deluded simpleton you essentially accuse me of being.
I'm not making an accusation. I'm just stating that the data and the intent do not always end in the conclusion that people think that they do. That is mostly because people don't know how to do a proper analysis of anything really. This is not specific to this but the claims of a tangible outcome are vastly overstated.
I would suggest that the "usability agency" is a considerable bias as well based on my other comment. Literally there is no business if you tell the client not to touch something, so the default state is that a change must be made otherwise there is no report to make.
The reason that we stopped hiring agencies to run user studies for us is that at no point did anyone run a baseline analysis against a null hypothesis i.e. no change. I got into a hefty argument with a consultant over this who said that a change is 100% necessary, without providing any evidence and before the study was run. That is a complete lack of objectivity, intellectual and professional integrity in the industry.
The end game of two large, well known agencies being hired was that we had to roll ALL the changes back because it crippled clients.
This cost us a LOT of money. Try writing off a couple of million GBP and you'll see where the ROI is.
I literally gave a real-world example: the post-pasting popup menu in Microsoft software (Office, etc). Usage telemetry had shown that the “paste” command is very frequently followed by “undo”, because the result was not as intended. Then people would either use a Paste Special command, or paste it normally and follow it by manual reformatting. So they added the little popup that lets you change the pasted formatting in situ. I think this is a fantastic feature, and well-implemented: it makes it easy to recover from an unexpected result, yet doesn’t force any change to one’s workflow at all: you can also simply ignore it and fix the problem in the old ways.
Personally I think that's a shitty feature because it doesn't work like anything else in the rest of the OS or any other software. It's literally an edge case coded into the office UI runtime.
Compare to "Paste and Match Style" on macOS which is system wide.
I don’t disagree in principle with that statement, but maybe I’m just not quite as jaded as you.
It's not really jaded, but experienced.
Put it this way, who's the last person you go to for financial advice? Actually a financial advisor. Why? Well it turns out that they have two principal objectives (a) earning commission and (b) reaching sales targets. That gets you a mediocre outcome. What gets you the best outcome is developing an understanding of the domain and the problem and that comes from a proper study and analysis, not witchcraft and hope for a fixed price.
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