A pet peeve of mine are meetings that discuss products, UI, site design or anything else that touches upon “users”. Or customers, or leads, or decision makers or insert your own favorite euphemism that makes it clear they’re not people like you or me.
I suggest we call them what they are: Units of Purchase Power.
Classical example are surveys. You spend countless hours talking about where to embed the survey form, where to store the data, how to get around the nasty back button problem, because Units of Purchase Power unfortunately like to click the back button. Life would be so much better if UPP’s didn’t try funky things with their browser.
Then there’s the data we deserve to collect. You know UPPs have unlimited supply of time, so we might as well use it all, and ask they “list all five …”.
I personally don’t have all the time in the world. If I have seven on my head that I need to pare down to five, whatever minute or two it will take is a minute or two I’ll never see back. Same if I can only come up with three. I don’t spend my time inventing two more, just close the page and go somewhere else.
I heard other people have time constraints to, even if it’s just for spending more quality time on Second Life, so it always frustrates me that “respect others” is never top on the priority list. Or anywhere on the priority list for that matter.
But enough talking about respecting other people’s time. M. E. Kabay has a funny story about a lame survey gone wrong:
Question 8: “Is there a particular site, page or set of documents that are hard to find?” If you really insist on making this a required field, change the text to read, “Identify at least one particular site, page or set of documents that are hard to find – we cannot believe that you would actually want to leave this blank as a response. Or, if you want to be really difficult, write any of the words NO, NIET, NON, NICHTS or UGRONYDSKY in the space below.”
When you’re done with that, read this interview with Brent Simmons on the design decisions behind the iPhone NetNewsWire app. Couple of choice quotes:
Clarity is more valuable than density.
Also:
It’s made me wish even more strongly that I could delete features at will — at whim, even.
I usually don’t read interviews through to the end, but I do wish this one ran longer. More, please.