Bicking isn't saying you should decide exactly what your users want and give them that and only that. (Well, he's not saying to not do that either, if in a situation where that's doable...) He is simply saying that if your final conclusion is "users want more control", then you're copping out. You are giving up on figuring out what your users really want (whether they know what it is or not), and just throwing options at them in hopes that they'll be able to make something out of them. Or at least stop complaining.
Giving your users control isn't bad. Not figuring out why your users are asking for more control is bad.
Choice only amounts to control if those choices are meaningful and legible.
In the end, I think/fear that on average lazyness wins every time.
The feeling of slamming into second as you come out of a corner in a little sports car. In an automatic, its just a pedal and the wheel, in a manual you physically engage the warp mode. It feels good, gives a greater sense of power in your actions and also contributes to enjoyable familiar muscle memory. Humans dig physical ritual.
Germany is a huge exporter of precision-engineering so there might be a cultural sentiment there.
Not substantially.
>they're more efficient
Not any more.
>they make the most of small engines with limited torque.
Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner!
People like manuals because they can choose when to up-shift whereas the guys programming the automatic transmission will program it to up-shift as soon as they think they can get away with (for fuel economy and emissions). With a manual you can let your 1L hornets nest scream along at 4k all the time giving you close to peak power on tap whenever you want it. Basically manuals are a hack around regulations that force manufactures to build cars with performance characteristics nobody wants (under-powered engines and transmissions that up-shift at the drop of a hat). Those regulations are much stronger in Europe so the value proposition of a manual transmission is better there.
Can't do that with most automatics.
Well... performance characteristics that everybody wants -- for everybody else. They themselves want warp drive, but prefer everybody else help hold down the price of gasoline and the carbon content of the atmosphere.
then again i ride bikes too and prefer a more active driving experience
In this view, users still don't want control, its just a symptom of the failure to provide what users do actually want.
The truth is probably between these 2 outlooks
No. I want to send my kid to the local school that will be good and I want to go to the local hospital where I will be treated by a well qualified caring medical professional. I don't want to have to create pivot tables.
That's assuming there's a universal "good" - even if a school meets some general standards one school can have a better arts program, the other might be more biased towards sports, etc. I don't see anything wrong with having choice - having a good baseline everywhere is a separate issue.
I mean they like football, but they also like drawing, but then neither of those are well known for paying the bills. So I still circle back making sure they get a balanced education.
The problem though is that choice is the supposed solution to not having good schools. That may be UK specific though.
Yeah, people mostly start asking for control when you make the default experience shitty. They want control to escape the hell they've been put in, but they have to pay a price for it either in money or time. So functionally, "give users more control" is really saying "make the user pay more to use my product."
In an ideal world everything would be bespoke and custom tailored for me, but the idea there is that the tailor knows how to create what I want. Not that I have to go tailoring all my own stuff. I'm not competent enough to do that unless it's my hobby.
OTOH, if "user control" is seen as table stakes or baseline, it can limit the shittiness level that users will tolerate by lowering switching costs.
Customization gives control to those who want to take it.
There is an orthogonal argument that this is also harmful to some people's aspect, but "give the people what they want" doesn't seem like it's reductive. Especially when it seems like people in our society can be clustered and have some clear groupings occur.
What users do is different from what users would like to do. If people's aspirations lined up with their real behaviors, Planet Fitness wouldn't have a business model. But when navigating the world people often want to improve themselves into something they want to be, not fall deeper into the worst tendencies they exhibit in any given moment.
Designing clear interfaces, measuring things and coming up with models are all really hard. Data needs to be paired with human judgment and decision making.
They KNOW they don't know better than its users. But they don't want to let users decide, because users would make decisions that go against their own profits, so they remove the choice and lie about why.
A good way to summarize, "users want control," is to note that, "users don't want to be screwed." Users don't want to be put into a situation where they have lost so much power, they don't have practical options, or the only options they have left are punitively unpleasant.
I don't think this is that bad, on its own. Choice is a pain in the ass, so it's useful to have things pick for you, when you don't care to choose yourself (which is very common).
The main issue is that there is never offered a means to correct the algorithm, when it chooses something the user decidedly doesn't want. That is, there's no user-inputted feedback mechanism; they go for implicit tracking like "eyeball-time" to correct the algorithm, despite the user (me) being both able and willing to give an explicit answer. I want Netflix to give me better recommendations, and I'm willing to put in a bit of effort to support that.
But Netflix doesn't want me to help them help me.
And thats just stupid.
Changing from stars to thumbs increased the quantity of data (at the expense of granularity), but didn't change the relative advantage of tracking behavior over explicit ratings.
Now, your ratings may be free of these issues, but that data isn't very useful in isolation, so blame the bad data from other users for the removal of the feedback mechanism.
[0] https://www.netflixprize.com/
[1] https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/netflix-thumbs-vs-star...
Explain straddling that line ... oh and the third axis is cost.
Not trusting user input is about security. Verify that everything is something which they /should/ be able to do. Think say for a game's bank account. They should never be able to directly change that value without valid transactions to and from.
If they can lose money by writing a check to null that is bad. If they can /gain/ money by writing a negative check to null that is /really/ bad. Also really bad is being allowed to just take money from banks of others without a validated transaction.
Configurability lets them do anything that is in their rights. If they can access their bank balance and set it as part of their signature that is allowed along with say setting their crosshair to display the target HP which they already know. If they can create a custom texture of their bank balance repeated ad nauseam that is fine. So long as they are capable of that stuff already.
I suppose morally there's a difference, but that's just us and our biases.