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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

That sparked a funny idea in my head, what if we tricked product managers industry wide to follow KPIs and A/B tests that resulted in a better user experience for consumers, instead of experiences that coincidentally slightly upticked "engagement".

Because it seems like this mystery shopper is already doing that.

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„Messing up your competitors A/B test“ is not unheard of as a tactic in highly competitive ecommerce settings.

Do software engineers actually implement that? That seems pretty immoral. I'd rather let them run the a/b test and steal whatever solution they end up with.

In some contexts you do that or you're fired. Some people can't afford to be fired, so they do it.

Eh, I am sure you could convince yourself it isn't immoral... everyone in HN seems to think things like google analytics are bad because of the privacy implications, and doesn't have a problem blocking them (which would also 'mess with a/b tests'). You could just argue that you are hindering their user spying.

Not a great argument, but good enough to allow a developer to sleep at night.

True, but this is not "messing up your competitors A/B test".

Consider companies like Uber....

I can't find reasons why would this be immoral. I'd say it's rather aggressive and won't earn you good reputation for sure. But it's sort of fair game. Compared to many business practices (lobbying, forced arbitration, patent trolling, DMCA, price dumping etc.) this is extremely mild one.

Generally active sabotage is frowned upon as opposed to winning in fair competition.

Given that engagement metrics have been heavily interfered with for many years, as a result of bots and other activities, and yet PMs still rely on them it seems unlikely that they will be pulled away from that spectacle anytime soon. I like your idea though.

> "and yet PMs still rely on them it seems unlikely that they will be pulled away from that spectacle anytime soon."

I think they meant, since PMs will never stop using metrics, we should write bots that skew those metrics in favor of an experience for the consumer rather than the perceived increase in engagement.

What are some examples good KPIs and A/B tests for better consumer user experiences? Engagement is obviously deeply flawed if a good consumer user experience is your goal, but it does have the nice property of being easily measured. Do you rely on users constantly rating their experience on a numeric scale?

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