Whitespace killed an enterprise app

Re:Whitespace killed an enterprise app by TeMPOraL on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @04:44PM (#19157362)

Watching someone use an interface can be low-quality information, especially when that interface is already heavily optimized to guide the user down a prescribed path. If that's your sole input, then you're essentially doing a naïve gradient descent, and you're bound to be stuck in a local minimum.

Asking users, in addition to watching them struggle, can inform you on what they're actually trying to achieve, and what's their mental model.

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Re:Whitespace killed an enterprise app by jrochkind1 on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @07:56PM (#19158733)

I do try to avoid getting them to tell me _solutions_ though.

"What's the most annoying part of your job with this software" (with followup questions to understand why and what they were trying to do and _why_ they were trying to do it) is better than "What feature do you want that would most make this software less annoying"?

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Re:Whitespace killed an enterprise app by TeMPOraL on Thursday February 14, 2019 @01:37AM (#19160070)

This I can agree with, but with a caveat: if you're dealing with professional domain and users who are domain experts, it might be worth it to pick their brains about features too. They might have used other software in the past, and know a design element or functionality that works better.

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