These are the basic forces of commerce. Or any interaction. Amazon, target, even my loca coffee shops are not aligned with what’s best for me. They’re aligned with what’s best for them, with an eye towards maximizing overlap.
But where they want the customer to do something the customer wouldn’t, that happens everywhere. It’s not limited to tech.
Unless I’m mistaken, your credit score is your financial credit rating, not your social. It isn’t affected if you get a ticket jaywalking, or acting like a jerk.
There are interconnections between the two, but there are pretty clear distinctions.
This argument would call for an end to the distinction between manslaughter and honicide, as an example.
It’s a great example of why we don’t allow victims, or relatives of victims, to or
Jesus their own justice. Because they don’t care about distinctions that we, as a society, have decided are important.
“Because, ma’am, I wanted to know who had read with sufficient attention that they would catch something so minor in the footnotes. Then I would know who had invested their time and attention in my paper.”
I think this is inaccurate. One, you can control your exposure while your product is crap. It’s just unlikely you’ll saturate your market before you can improve the product, if indeed your company is capable of improving the product.
Additionally, the downside isn’t “customers won’t use us bf they were burned”. It just creates a bump for the sales process to overcome. It’s an impediment to a sale, not a blocker.
Finally, before p/m fit, you need to be optimizing for learning over all else. More customers, even if they have a bad experience, brings more feedback. Also, you will have an asset - email list - of people who have signed up because you’re solving a problem they have curiousity / interest in.
Look at mongo. They’re now pretty successful by most evaluations, and they did this exact thing. Outside of Hn, very few remember how they over promised and under delivered.
It’s unclear to me that highly trained professionals are any better at this than a/b tests. Usually it’s the professionals themselves telling us that they’re better.
I guess it depends on where any individual places the task on the skill/luck or simple/complex scale. If the task (in this case, a design) is very simple — how many users who want to complete their voter registration form are able to — then experts may have an advantage.
OTOH, if it’s a complex space like facebooks news feed, I don’t think experts are the way to go. They simply think that they are.
FWIW, I’ve run hundreds of multivariate tests in my career. Every place I go, the design team is upset by the process, for the same reasons argued here. Every time, I challenge them to come up with 1 winning variation and 3 losers. If the designer-identified “winner” performs best, i pay them $10. If any of the losers wins, I get $10.
I have yet to meet a designer that can, a priori, pick the winning variation better than random chance would suggest.
Expertise is not valuable in an unpredictable context. Complex user facing systems like the news feed are impossible to predict.
I’m channeling Kahneman and Mauboussin here, but their theory explains my experience very well.