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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Maybe but there are many other methods to figure out user needs and how to implement those needs in the best way.

Which ones (honest question)? I know gathering data with questionnaires. But asking people is a hard problem. "Do you want a faster browser", "do you want more choice in the UI" will lead to a all yes result. If you ask open questions you need much more time to answer the questionnaire and much more time to interpret the data.

Sit down with a user and watch how they use your product. This is a well known method for seeing how the product is being used, and what causes friction. No interpretation of user input required.

Mozilla does do that. It looks like that too doesn't seem to give them reason to preserve compact mode.

(Though to be fair, UX research like that does indeed highlight what causes friction, not necessarily how many people are strongly attached to features like compact mode.)

Field studies and usability testing are some techniques that can be used when you want to discover novel needs and not just minmax existing implementations. Shit is hard because it takes tons of work and you have to have the organizational maturity to accept difficult changes.

If we do a field test of browser usage, do we expect the result to leave anything standing that allows typical power user workflows such as HN readers to work?

Sure, "just" target power users in your tests and have hypotheses at the right level of abstraction.

Yeah, but how do you assign a weighting here if you don't have the telemetry?

Maybe Firefox usage is really like 25% power users, but most of those disable Telemetry, causing the priorities to be all screwed up (See the ALSA example!).

Questionnaires?

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