Comment by Twey
23 days ago
It's a lovely idea, but so far all software personalization I can think of (in the sense of software adapting to the individual, rather than the individual adapting their software à la malleable software) has been weaponized against the user rather than used to support them. Occasional attempts in the other direction like adaptive user interfaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface) tend to fail because they break habit formation (c.f. Raskin)
I think you shouldn’t optimize for metrics and behavior without understanding all that you can empathetically about the user, to know when you are causing more harm than good.
This is why Atlassian’s dogfooding approach has consistently been practical.
Right, I definitely think collecting user telemetry as source data for features is helpful, though users can be understandably wary about it. I just haven't seen any beneficial examples of _automatically_ acting on that data per user.