2015.1.12

Today, over coffee, I had a chat about user testing. The users of a friend’s product had been complaining about the new version of that product, venting and speaking loudly about their preference for the old version, and she was wondering how she could find out what they wanted changed without promising any changes or a full roll-back to what once existed.

I told her to see what people actually did with her product, to watch them use it; I also told her to watch them use the old version and see how the usage differed. The delta between those two patterns of use would give her insight into what changes she needed to make without inciting another complaint session from her users.

I’m no expert in user testing, but that approach made sense: people are wary of change. We all get used to one way of doing things, and when we’re forced to do something a different way, we will naturally complain, rebel, and be upset. While there is value is listening to those complaints, there’s more value in seeing how behavior shifts, how changes — in a product or a service or even in just other everyday parts of life — spur a different way of acting or thinking. It’s in observing those shifts, those little nuances that we can learn most about somebody, and thus, learn a little bit about how we relate to them too.

Then again, I’m no expert in user testing. I just like people.

Diversions:

• The best rapper alive, every year since 1979. Hard to argue with most of this list.
• I had the chance to dine at Next in the first month of its opening, and had to use the online “ticketing” system instead of a reservation system. It was clunky at that time, but I’m glad to see it’s progressing and more restaurants are embracing the idea of “tickets.”

I hadn’t ever thought about the history of the chapter before, but it’s interesting to see how the chapter evolved to become the de facto text separator in long-form writing:

The unassuming quality of the chapter, its way of not insisting on its importance but marking a transition nonetheless, turns out to be its most useful, if also its most vexing, quality. It is a vocabulary for noting the way we can organize our pasts into units. Some things stop; others begin. We note these shifts, in relationships or jobs or domiciles, reassured that the environing story itself — our lives — are still ongoing. But how do we know when we are starting a new chapter? How are we justified in picking a moment out of fluid passing time and declaring a pause?