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.
You didn’t say “people”, you said
me, so it’s hard to not see this as you basically calling me incompetent or stupid.
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.
That’s on you. If a client wants to test the existing state, an agency will do it. If you weren’t getting this, it’s because you neglected to ask for it — or more likely didn’t want to pay for it when offered.
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.
Then you were dealing with a REALLY shitty agency. The one I worked at absolutely did not work like that.
Many of our projects began with testing the status quo to figure out where the problems are. (One memorable example was a health insurance company’s enrollment forms: an old lady was doing the test and got to the question “have you consumed cannabis products within the past 60 days?” to which she said out loud “no, but I could use some right about now!” 😂)
Don’t extrapolate to the entire industry; there ARE honest players. Just avoid the ones in any way affiliated with big management consulting companies!
I will also add that a LOT of the usability experience I got was at the software company, where it was all being done for the benefit of our own end users.
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.
Jeez Louise you’re rigid!
TONS of software uses custom controls to do useful things. Done well — like here — they are unobtrusive and doesn’t interfere with existing workflows.
On Windows, the basic UI widgets are MUCH dumber than those on macOS, so Windows developers are more or less forced to use custom widget extensions or third-party widget libraries to get more advanced behavior.
Compare to "Paste and Match Style" on macOS which is system wide.
Yep, it’s a great feature. But it can’t work everywhere. The document object models of the Office apps are WAY more complex than even macOS’s basic widgets. macOS and windows both use RTF as their basic formatted text format. Word, for example, does not. It’s a stylesheet-based system with nested stylesheets which apply to different levels of document structure, so merging them requires intimate knowledge of said structure. An OS-level command can’t do that.
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.
I’m experienced, too.
You’re jaded from negative experiences. You accuse me of having bias, but so do you. I’m sorry you had very bad experiences with agencies, but not all are like that. Some are comprised of good, honest people who do good work that truly benefits their clients.
FWIW one reason I left the computer and usability industry entirely is because
I got jaded — about clients. Too many times, after properly studying the problem, we’d design and test a really good solution, but the client would then not implement it as designed (often because they didn’t want to put in the effort on their backend systems to actually support the interaction design they’d been seeking). The half-baked implementation then would introduce new problems, which the client would tolerate for a few years before undertaking another website redesign, throwing out all prior work and starting over again rather than improving the implementation. So as a usability engineer, I rarely got to see my actual designs implemented, just pale, unsatisfying ghosts of them.
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.
Well what you’re describing isn’t a financial advisor, it’s a broker or salesperson, who at a big financial firm may well have the title of “financial advisor”. But there exist independent financial advisors, and their advice, as I understand it, can be quite good precisely because they aren’t selling you any of the products they advise you to buy (or not). The flip side is that their services aren’t free.
You get what you pay for: a
free financial analysis or
free usability review is basically a way to get you in the door so money can be made on you some other way. It sounds to me like you may not have a good feel for this.
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