Comment by rdedev

3 days ago

> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better.

This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it. Otherwise you end up with a complicated system that is going to put off new users.

You can even have different power users who likes different parts of the software. Now it's totally possible to end up with extensive subsystems that don't really gel with each other

My anecdote for this is the the recentish redesign of Musescore. Tantacrul, the ux designer/product manager for Musescore has an hour long video on how he redesigned the interface and UX of the software. He is also a musician so you can call him a power users if you want but that was not the users he had in mind when redesigning the UX

https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ

> This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it.

Simple things should work. The types of errors described in the article about feature creep and errors with simple user flows are all too common.

Just surf the web with the developer console open. It's not just "an error was thrown", but the kinds of errors and how they manifest. A rejected promise after localStorage access was blocked, after user clicked a submit button on a form that went through twenty seven delegation calls of Angular js using backspace-escaped method names to handle invalid HTML, and now the form can't submit because they did it using the latest tools, as per their resume. Crap like that. The level of quality of production web code is the cause of the poor user experience and outright failures. It is unacceptable and its cause is directly traceable to the design decisions and skills employed in its production.