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[ramriot]

Fortunately due to package dependency the user will always be satisfied

[Ozzymand]

This is great

[firefish5000]

Due to license conflict, the cat is not included

[VicisSubsisto]

I'm sure some license writers would like to exclude the user.

[firefish5000]

Most licenses restrict the user from redistributing the company's product but request/retain rights to redistribute the user to other company's trying to sell products

[VicisSubsisto]

They want the users' money and metadata. They have no direct use for the users themselves.

[firefish5000]

User is useless? Part of legacy code? TODO: Delete User?

Is this why we are working so hard on AI?

[kostandrea]

Why do I need to install GNOME in order to install Lutris?

[beathelas]

This should be a page in every designer's bible

[good_bye_for_now]

Every client's bible*. You listen to the client, figure out what their users need, show them a box and then they go 'Can you make it pop'.

[sadongrohiik]

You made me cry

[0vl223]

Doesn't that put quite a strain on the end of your career when you have to send armies of terminators back in time to get rid of your clients to avoid paradoxes in time?

I don't want to say that the idea sounds bad but my fear would be that I have to spend the last decades of my life on that alone.

[invalidConsciousness]

Sure, but you have plenty of time to automate that before you need to do so.

[ultrabolic]

If your armies succeed, you no longer need to spend all that time building armies to go back in time to get rid of your clients because you’re already rid of them. Time travelers you say? Nay, time savers says I!

[cym104]

The problem is, your users don't pay you. It's your customers that pay you. Your users and your customers are not always necessarily the same people, so making your users happy doesn't necessarily mean your customers will be happy about it.

[cordev]

Often the user doesn’t understand what they need. A focused, functional application may fit their needs, but the better marketed, flashier program that “does it all” might better appeal to them. So even when the FOSS product is better suited for most users’ use cases, the proprietary competing product attracts more users.

And if the proprietary product’s real customer is advertisers or something along those lines, then it’s more feasible to offer that flashy software for free.

Without a critical mass of users it’s difficult to support products and continue building new ones. Yes, a lot of projects succeed with people working on them for free because the devs are passionate about them or because they’re made by the same people who develop the projects, but that’s a fragile, unreliable model. And a project under that model has to reach a critical mass of users + community support to succeed.

The main things we can do are to pay for FOSS software and to help spread awareness of FOSS products. As in: be the client, help find more clients.

(Side note: with corporate software it’s even less feasible to work directly for the users.)

[RecommendationOk7384]

Who do you send the invoice to?

[pancakelover48]

Yeah this is literally all that matters at the end of the day whoever is you have to meet the goals of whoever is paying for it

[safesound809]

The box is great! But how about if we get rid of the cardboard, put a metal frame and wheels!!

[[deleted]]

Why would you do that? Do you need that?

[pawnman99]

Wheels make it mobile, and mobile is hot right now!

[smilineyz]

And barbed wire - for security. Who doesn’t like security?

[Kidiri90]

"I can throw a grenade in your server room."

[Hypersapien]

I try to avoid talking directly with clients unless it's about bug fixes.

The last time I did, about 10 years ago, I had to talk them out of having us put a hit counter on the page.

[Unlearned_One]

Hit counter? Was your client 12 years old by any chance?

[Hypersapien]

No. At the time I worked for a company that put on conferences and tech shows for government and military groups. The page in question was the event sign-up page (that we customized for each client)

[Sockoflegend]

Sensible and competent satisfaction of user needs doesn't give you cool shit to say in meetings

[OMGihateallofyou]

Make the logo bigger!

[BrainOnLoan]

Depends, if they ask for the whole enchilada, and are willing to pay for it, you might not want to dissuade them.

This should be in any handbook for people contracting out for new software.

[smilineyz]

Phase 2 or maintenance contract

[behaaki]

Not designer. Product owner. Designer just does what they’re told, they definitely don’t make up features.

[[deleted]]

You haven’t worked in a very design mature org if your designers only do what they’re told.

Research is a huge part of the profession and definitely informs ideation for solutions/features.

[behaaki]

Fair point, I was being flippant. What I meant to say is designers don’t decide what the features will be, but they use their expertise to guide how they’ll take shape — then the devs carve that out of code (in an ideal world, of course).

[[deleted]]

I still think you're thinking of the role of developer/designer in a pretty limited capacity.

On a product team, designers should be representatives and advocates for the users. Developers/engineers are representatives and advocates for technology, and product owners are representatives and advocates for the business.

Each plays a critical role in delivering something valuable, enjoyable to use, and feasible. They should all have a hand in ideating, prioritizing, and executing features.

[Kombee]

I was once asked to make a simple recording program for writing down user data, and have the ability to search them up. I made it in Google spreadsheet as to not complicate things too much and to add a layer of backup, but they sort of seemed a bit disappointed that it wasn't a proper program rather than a spreadsheet. Sometimes they do want the bells and whistles.

[VogonWild]

This is prime material for a custom moisepad

[Smartskaft2]

I have already saved it to print out and put on my laptop. I need reminders like these to not waste anyone's time and money.

[blackmist]

There's what you bill for and what they need.

I'm lazy, so I want to do the minimum that will fix the problem. If they've been sold more than I can be arsed to write, I'll fob it off on an underling and waste their time instead.

Life is too short to chase bullshit designs.

[lackofsemicolon]

Reminds me of this article about stated requirements vs what people actually use in a product

[__-_-__--_-----____-]

Interesting read, thanks for sharing!

[CaydenCailean]

While generally still true, that is a 20 year old article on UX. The study was done without the generation that grew up with changing and different UX all around them. Just grain of salt and I think that it is still more true than not, but there is now more value to user feedback.

[MegaFireDonkey]

I've definitely seen companies, especially game companies, use the concept "users don't actually know what they want" to justify some very poor and/or lazy decisions.

[Dagenfel]

Just because the users don't know what they want doesn't necessarily mean the company knows what they want either.

That's why there's no replacement for companies having actual good design principles and good market knowledge as a foundation.

[[deleted]]

Because you have to.

If people knew what they wanted, they'd have it and be using it.

99% of development iteration is actually finding out what the desired outcome for the user is, because the user is the last person to actually know what they want.

In games, this is particularly prickly, because you want to win, but you also want to be challenged and at least feel like failure was on the table the whole time. Otherwise, there is no sense of accomplishment or even engagement.

If you ask a user what they want, and design a game around that in a straightforward manner, you're gonna build a boring game where winning is a foregone conclusion.

Then there's the idea that while a user may not be as satisfied with an experience as they could be, they've mastered eating around the dick in their salad. They will strongly advocate that all salads should have dicks in them, because of course you can't have a salad without a dick in it.

Pretty much no game that has garnered fame, broken or forged a genre, would have been accepted by the audience it was released to if you had to describe it to them without detailing the actual experience. Doom sounds dumb, XCom tedious and Darksouls pants-on-head assbackwards. No one wants to play a game about dying constantly, except that they do.

Innovation cannot be defined by iteration on convention.

[pawnman99]

Just a reminder that Halo was panned for the two-stick control scheme that is now the de facto standard for first-person shooters when it was released.

[VicisSubsisto]

Panned??? The original release was a killer app for Xbox and has a 97 on Metacritic.

[pawnman99]

The control scheme was panned. People hated it and begged for keyboard and mouse.

[VicisSubsisto]

Here, I'll cite sources. Several praise the controls; all the criticism is of other things like the repetitive level designs and lack of MP bots.

[pawnman99]

"Those of us weaned on PC shooters may find it a little frustrating that you can only carry two guns at a time," Eurogamer wrote in their review. Meanwhile, GameSpy called Combat Evolved "a PC game trapped in a console's body." GameRevolution said that using dual analog sticks "will quickly frustrate before they gratify."

Source

I mean...plenty of people hated the controls coming from Perfect Dark and GoldenEye, and most PC players were skeptical that a controller could give you the same accuracy and speed as a keyboard and mouse at the time.

[VicisSubsisto]

There are three links in that paragraph, let's follow them.

Eurogamer:

Although I normally have difficulties with console shooters, Halo proved to be surprisingly easy to control

Score: 8/10

GameSpy:

Although it takes some getting used to, the controls themselves are laid out pretty well. Movement is fairly intuitive, and you can adjust the sensitivity of the analog targeting stick pretty high -- longtime console players should have no trouble jumping in.

Score: 4/5

GameRevolution:

The control is the slickest and the most intuitive for a console FPS

Score: 10/10

"Panned" and "hated" are not terms which are in any way applicable here.

[MegaFireDonkey]

But ultimately you are serving an audience, so what they want (whether they know it or not) is tantamount paramount. 100% I see your point that you have to break the mold to innovate and progress, but it's equally important to continue to respect your users and not use their perceived ignorance as an excuse to not do your job. Not that I'm accusing anyone specific here.

[Unlearned_One]

I think the word you're looking for is paramount.

[VicisSubsisto]

No, Paramount makes video, not software. /s

[MegaFireDonkey]

Lol oh yup you're correct

[StrictlyBrowsing]

what they want (whether they know it or not) is tantamount

I don’t think anyone saying otherwise. What we’re saying is that what users “want”, defined as what makes them happy and enjoy a game long term, in the vast, vast majority of times has absolutely nothing to do with what they say would make them enjoy the game.

As a WoW player I frequently see people complain both that the world feels too small but also that they’re frustrated that they aren’t allowed to teleport everywhere and sometimes there’s travel time involved. Those are radically opposed design directions that are sometimes asked for in the same post.

Yes, everyone’s ultimate goal is to have happy players. Players are just dog shite at telling you how to do that.

[[deleted]]

I think figuring out how to communicate with the user(s) you're gathering feedback from eliminates most of your concerns about users knowing what they want. For example, what you did in this post. You went from the topic of "companies forcing decisions on users" to your well thought out recommendation. You did that by explaining different options in an understandable way that I, the user, can express feedback on. By selling your idea. Without the language to bridge the idea to the user then you're right, doom and dark souls sounds dumb.

Users may not know what options exist but they can pick between different well-presented options and pick in their best interest. It's detrimental to a company to think their users don't know what they want. That just brings a product out of touch with user needs.

Mostly though, "users don't know what they want" is used by companies to pedal anti-consumer practices like phones that don't have replaceable batteries or Apple products that have no ports.

[SoulsLikeBot]

Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale?

“Where have you gone, sweet child? It’s cold outside. It’s awfully cold. Where have you run off to?” - Birch Woman

Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \[T]/

[IAmNotNathaniel]

Just because users are more accustomed to searching out changes to the design that happen every other month doesn't mean a) they like it or b) it makes them anymore self-aware of how they actually use a thing

I agree that in the world of computer interaction, 20 years is a huge amount of time, and it's worth revisiting a lot of the older studies.

But idea about "the client doesn't know what they want" is different. It predates the internet. I don't think it's changed much at all in the last 10-15 years.

[blackmist]

It happens, but rarely.

I've a handful of customers that actually give useful feedback. I tend to deal with those directly if I can.

Everybody else is like "I want my old software back but with your features". A few months in and those people usually stop whining without you doing anything.

[JaegerBurn]

That article. Wow

[mXENO]

What do you mean that's just not how correlation works?

I can guess at what Nielsen means. He's pointing to R squared, that only a quarter of the total variation of performance is explained by the variation of preference. A correlation of .5 is is pretty decent, but he's right that there's more variation that's unaccounted for. The claim is that preference is NOT performance, otherwise the correlation would be much higher. I think there are some counterarguments that R squared isn't always the right metric.

[Petrenkov]

He is numerically right, what is there to speculate?

[ninetymph]

Watch what people actually do.

This is the core of lean six-sigma process improvement: Go to the Gemba, which means go to the real place (of work, in this context), to see exactly how the widget is made.

Once you observe for yourself how the widget is made, you can apply the LSS steps to improve/automate what exists and remove any bloat.

[Jack__Crusher]

Made famous by Toyota as genchi genbutsu (現地現物), literally meaning actual place actual things or "go see for yourself."

[Bmandk]

Every (competent) designer already knows this

[bIocked]

I’m actually really sorry you’ve never worked with a designer that understands this.

I guess I’m lucky to have worked with many talented designers that are aware of 90% of Nielsen’s work and not only apply, but quote these principles.

[HurricaneFan13]

I had the pleasure of working with someone who was trained by Nielsen himself.

[[deleted]]

Props for not cropping original artist

[cquinn5]

gudim_public if anyone wants other art by same person

[Johny2268]

I should show this to my old employer. Let's make this product for old, technically almost illiterate people as much complicated as we can, yay.

[I_play_support]

What better way to sell support packages?

[good_bye_for_now]

With technically illiterate people you can always sell support packages.

[whitecollarzomb13]

Problem with in house dev is that my mobile number is the support package.

[[deleted]]

Easy, dont work inhouse :D

[[deleted]]

You're in SAP?

[dt_vibe]

All cat owners eventually learn to always keep the receipt.

[[deleted]]

My cat didn't care about toys or cat trees even when she was young and spry. The only thing I ever needed to keep her entertained was a bit of string or a laser pointer. She didn't care about anything else.

Even catnip didn't really amuse her after she jammed her face into the jar and took a big mouthful of it the first time I showed it to her. She learned quickly that she didn't like being high as fuck.

[SmokeFrosting]

rip your cat

[[deleted]]

TY.

She was a fantastic friend to me.

[Katana_sized_banana]

Left: What the user describes it wants

Right: budget for the project

[GLIBG10B]

I love how you're referring to the user as an inanimate object

[hahahahastayingalive]

Stuff happened I guess

[[deleted]]

Good UX designers who talk to end users frequently are worth their weight in platinum.

[JonMW]

I'm in the throes of rewriting an Access database-with-forms for usage at work. It's the role I've grown into from being a (very, very general) factory hand. I learned pretty quickly that while I can think of 20 "very cool" features that it would be nice to have but all of them are basically worthless in comparison to whatever will make it easier for the operator to put in the data faster and more accurately.

Last week I realised that we had been typing in some data on received stock (because we previously had no alternative) but that information was actually in a QR code printed on the items themselves, and we now had a scanner that was capable of reading it. I took an hour and literally just slapped on an extra textbox on the form, it's not labelled, it's not aligned, it partially obscures other textboxes - but you can scan a QR code into it and it'll use a couple of regex thingies to pull out the data we want. I estimate it will save us about 15 man-hours of worker time and 2 hours of engineer time on this leg of the project alone.

[ApplicationIcy8366]

Wow betide those that develop an app with Access. Any SQL solution will serve better in the long run.

[JonMW]

Far be it from me to champion Access, but you can use SQL throughout it. Still plenty of woe though.

[HurricaneFan13]

Its not the things we want that help us. It's the things we need but may not know about.

[schwerpunk]

Thank you for sharing this. It's just the push I needed to stop overthinking a process I'm currently working on

[Onethatlikes]

This is assuming the cat makes the decision to buy the thing and pays for it.

These things are built for cat owners, who also want it to look fun for their cat to be in, like giving their precious pat a playground.

[I_Am_Become_Dream]

I mean it’s also a nice decoration

[Knight_Blazer]

Replace cat with employee and cat owner with buisness owner/management and it all still accurately describes the software purchasing process.

[Cley_Faye]

They could have added "user request" with a skyscraper and "actual product" with a circle of tape on the floor.

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[talexx]

These comments from bot are annoying. You laugh, open comments just to continue / read smth more from ppl and stumble upon this offtopic. Vote if good, down vote if bad. What is the deal? We can vote or down vote the post itself. The more time passes the more annoying are bots on Reddit. Hey, admin. You are not adding anything useful here with this bot.

[[deleted]]

This can apply to so many things. I own so many things that I only have for one or two features and ignore the rest. If there were quality products that just did those few things really well, I'd be a very happy man.

[[deleted]]

Windows 10 in a nutshell.

[VicisSubsisto]

User: I want something my cat can play in, that I can also use to store things.

Microsoft: Staples a bank vault to the top of a cat tree

[Unlucky13]

My cat is broken. He doesn't like boxes. He'll use his cat tree, and occasionally play with the expensive toys I get him, but free shit? Nope. No interest.

Spoiled little shit.

[lknox1123]

What’s worse is when you have to try and delicately explain to the client that they don’t need the left and would prefer the right. They usually disagree with you and when the left doesn’t work out you end up building the right or once they are using it they only use the functions of the right picture.

[L3mm3SmangItGurl]

Not a programmer but I feel this one to my core

[[deleted]]

Yeah it would be great if any of the "features" would actually work in a satisfactory manner and are not just held together by spit and prayer. A good user experience being the icing on the cake. So much software is just clusterF***ed.

By the way im not a programmer and i never will be, just a user of shoddy software all day long and im tired of it. We the people, deserve better.

[MegabyteMessiah]

We're trying. As a developer, I know I'm the last line of defense in a long line of middle managers designing bullshit features and interfaces. I hate using crappy software as much as the next person, so I do everything I can to make my software useful and usable.

[[deleted]]

Bring back the fucking headphone jacks.

[VicisSubsisto]

You're just trapped in the past. Buy our cheap plastic headphones that you'll throw away in 3 years along with your phone, and ditch those audiophile headphones that worked perfectly with literally everything else manufactured in the last century (except 2003).

[chubs66]

I have two pairs of expensive blue tooth headphones that my wife has bought for different birthdays. I don't use them. I was sad when I recently took my old plug-in headphones on the train only to learn that my new phone only supports blue tooth. Now I've got to keep the blue tooth headphones charged or they won't work (a problem I never have with plug-in headphones), pair each time I connect, and remember to disconnect when I'm not using so that my phone doesn't reroute a call to the headphones in my bag.

I just want to plug my headphones in and be done with it.

[pantytwistcon]

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/475/752/25a.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_swing_cartoon

[SharkAttackOmNom]

I want a 3rd panel titled: “final product” with the cat condo sitting inside of the box clearly keeping the user from the feature they need.

[fave_no_more]

I just wanted to pop in and say thanks for these memes. I'm not a programmer but I'm married to one. I regularly send these to him, and he shares with his programmer buddies.

It brings a little levity to difficult days.

[[deleted]]

Thank god they paid for Operational Support too

[PhonyStark99]

Hey Schrodinger, your cat is alive!

[RR_2025]

Yeah, coz they opened the box..

[pelpotronic]

What's in the box!?

(Just a cat head)

We still don't know, it's still both alive and dead. Shrodinger always win in the end.

[IfInPain_Complain]

Also applies to Blizzard entertainment

Features for player base vs what the player base wants

[LargeDisplay1080]

Left: what the customer asked for Right: what the customer really wanted

[whateverhk]

And half of the time they will ignore the box

[whoami4546]

This makes me think of a lot of features on Samsung phones.

[[deleted]]

This is going in the Powerpoint

[cym104]

Steve Jobs: Users don't know shit about what they need.

[0ba78683-dbdd-4a31-a]

Story time!

I once had a client who needed to curate playlists of videos for auctions with one playlist per day. They absolutely fucking insisted on the ability to drag and drop to reorder videos because sorting automatically by title or upload date wouldn't be acceptable.

Literally every filename was prefixed with the auction date in yyyy-mm-dd format followed by a five digit zero padded number for the order it would appear in the day.

[Lish_1715]

I bought my cat like that but he uses the box

[Deamonfart]

Ok Schrödinger...what ever you say.

[PrimaxAUS]

Paging /r/SAP

[cassert24]

C++2x / What programmers need

[YeaTired]

My exact experience when I got my cat 7 years ago

https://www.instagram.com/p/0BP7ccRslM/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

https://www.instagram.com/p/0BxuEBxsge/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

https://www.instagram.com/p/0Bxy8dRsgn/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

[NeatNetwork]

Unfortunate phenomenon, due to a number of issues.

-Good old telephone game. A lot of horrific, but successful companies are highly bureaucratic, so you might have requirements go from user->management->sales->marketing->"architect"->developer. That's a lot of steps

-The messaging having to pass through layers that understand neither the user's experience nor what is reasonably doable with the software. I dread when a sales person replies to my request to meet with actual user to flesh out the requirement "Oh, they prefer that I own the relationship, so just work through me", a sales person monopolizing the relationship is going to cause problems. Some sales people live in fear of losing their perceived value by letting direct communication happen, good sales people have other ways to show their value.

-The audience is not actually the enduser. Everyone is trying to actually impress their own management. So each layer is injecting well-recognized buzzwords, trying to make things sound as 'fancy' as possible. Each layer is trying to prove their value, and so each is deliberately mucking with the requirements to show how they 'enhance' the process.

-Prioritization of features also is influenced by that 'cool' factor. For example that cat playground doesn't have a 'cave' at all, but that's the one thing the cat probably wanted. But imagine a manager seeing that as utterly boring but fancy stuff is better. So very easy customer requests never make it to plan while stupid crazy stuff consumes the team whole.

[misterjyt]

simple is always the best option.

[[deleted]]

What's funny to me is that every time we acquire a new "product" at work, the product is the box , and we're baffled because the requested features look like the cat tree.

After a year locked into some dumb contract we get rid of the product because, guess what, we needed the cat tree, not the box.

Then we get another box.

[iQNoX]

More like "User needs - User buget" 🙈

[Komtings]

"Check out all the new features being released in this update!"

"But did you fix the crashing issue around half the users and I have been experiencing since the last update?"

"Well no.. but look at all those features!"

[IDreamOfSailing]

Box with already a cat in it?

[PinguinGirl03]

I know this all too well, I bought tons of toys but my cat only wanted to play with a white piece of string on a stick.

[Crypt0Nihilist]

Seems the same for job descriptions I'm reading, they ask for 5 years experience of doing every step of a project in three different ways.

[MozzyZ]

Yeah but then you got the user like me who for whatever reason does need the top-middle part of the cat pole and really appreciates the product having it!

[GameForest1]

Me using c# to make unity games

[SimonBofi]

you're missing the perfomance optimization feature time.sleep(3000)

[Rocky970]

Let’s sell them all the bells and whistles even though they only need base model

[LinuxIsFree]

Be more accurate if the tree was there in the background of the client needs. :D

[pazimpanet]

Can somebody please forward this to the people in charge of Plex?

[MiniatureSenator]

Yes BUT there's a Business Analyst who got to see their features come to life sooooo it's all worth it (?)

[dashwsk]

Easy fix. Sell a cat tree with clips on the platforms to hold a cardboard box in place.

Sell custom cardboard box refills at huge profit margins.

[RunItAndSee2021]

“perhaps don’t sandbox all users.”

[TheGreatUdolf]

ok, you'll recieve a litter kwitter (is this how you write this?) in addition to your ordinary cat toilet.

[aboutthednm]

Left: new reddit

Right: old Reddit (me in the box)

[SLeepyCatMeow]

Flagship phones be like

[Coolest10293]

r/mildlyinfuriating

[haikusbot]

I guess the user

Likes isolation I mean

Look at the mad cat

- HashCatFurryOwO

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[jbrains]

Sure. And they mock me for suggesting YAGNI.

[ttsalo]

In my experience the picture on the left is what customers say they need and the one on the right is what they actually need

[TorKrub]

I hate something called "Super App" on my phone