Google's "designer drain"

Re:Google's "designer drain" by timcederman on Friday March 20, 2009 @06:35PM (#525720)

I disagreed with this statement:

"Test driven design certainly has a huge place on the web — but it has to coexist with opinionated design. Otherwise you’re just giving the user what they think they need."

Actually, it's not that at all. If you're basing on how people react, it's not what they "think they need", you're basing decisions on actual behaviour. Adam, you're thinking of user research.

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Re:Google's "designer drain" by adamhowell on Friday March 20, 2009 @06:48PM (#525732)

Both. For example, when Presently/Goog Presentations was started the small team wanted to try and innovate. But as users were tested they didn't understand why it wasn't more like Powerpoint. And so attempts at innovation were trumped by user testing.

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Re:Google's "designer drain" by chris11 on Saturday March 21, 2009 @06:51AM (#526073)

So how do you use research to differentiate between users not understanding a product feature, and users not needing that feature?

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Re:Google's "designer drain" by silentOpen on Friday March 20, 2009 @07:34PM (#525770)

How do you get test driven design to find global maxima? Or at least obscure but large local maxima? It seems that if you start with "blah design" and iterate, you'll get the best "blah design" possible. Thoughts?

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Re:Google's "designer drain" by skalpelis on Saturday March 21, 2009 @03:48AM (#526027)

Henry Ford said something along the lines of "people just wanting a faster horse".

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