Comments on: Because? http://commadot.com/because/ Started in 1996, commadot.com has been been randomly publishing about UX, technology, Politics, the Jets and my kids. Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:23:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7-beta3 hourly 1 By: Dan Lipka http://commadot.com/because/comment-page-1/#comment-192 Dan Lipka Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:47:00 +0000 http://commadot.com/?p=340#comment-192 Intuit should hire me as a consultant to do this for you. This is exactly the consulting that I am doing for my boss's husband. Basically creating, administering, and analyzing survey to understand people's perceptions. It did this at Penn, Schoen, and Berland for some of the biggest companies in the country. Being objective, instead of subjective, can save companies a ton of money. Here is the link to my boss’s husband’s site, all of which I could do myself: http://www.bayerconsulting.com/. Here is Penn, Schoen’s site: http://www.psbresearch.com/ Intuit should hire me as a consultant to do this for you. This is exactly the consulting that I am doing for my boss’s husband. Basically creating, administering, and analyzing survey to understand people’s perceptions. It did this at Penn, Schoen, and Berland for some of the biggest companies in the country. Being objective, instead of subjective, can save companies a ton of money.

Here is the link to my boss’s husband’s site, all of which I could do myself: http://www.bayerconsulting.com/.
Here is Penn, Schoen’s site: http://www.psbresearch.com/

]]> By: fiat lux http://commadot.com/because/comment-page-1/#comment-191 fiat lux Tue, 31 Jan 2006 15:32:00 +0000 http://commadot.com/?p=340#comment-191 In point of fact, unless you have data in front of you that proves your point, you don't actually know what the user is thinking. You're drawing on your experience with similar situations in order to make an educated guess. Presumably, your experience is such that your guess is correct. And that's normal in the product development & marketing worlds. It's too expensive and time-consuming to do in-depth research, testing, surveys, etc about every single customer-facing question that comes up, so the experience of the people doing the work often becomes a proxy for actually asking the users. The problems happen when people think their knowledge is so deep that they don't need to ask the users anymore, or when they are unable to navigate the ambiguity of user demands/expectations and make wrong choices. Whether any of that meta musing applies to your situation, though, I don't know. Maybe the person in question was just being a butthead. In point of fact, unless you have data in front of you that proves your point, you don’t actually know what the user is thinking. You’re drawing on your experience with similar situations in order to make an educated guess. Presumably, your experience is such that your guess is correct.

And that’s normal in the product development & marketing worlds. It’s too expensive and time-consuming to do in-depth research, testing, surveys, etc about every single customer-facing question that comes up, so the experience of the people doing the work often becomes a proxy for actually asking the users.

The problems happen when people think their knowledge is so deep that they don’t need to ask the users anymore, or when they are unable to navigate the ambiguity of user demands/expectations and make wrong choices.

Whether any of that meta musing applies to your situation, though, I don’t know. Maybe the person in question was just being a butthead.

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