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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

hasn't everyone always said that "anyone can have an idea, implementation is what matters"?

That saying is often used in the context of non-practitioners throwing ideas at practitioners.

The flip side of the coin is practitioners who are too focused on what’s immediately in front of them to the exclusion of creativity.

I like J. Blow's take on ideas vs implementation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3UrdwnAu3o

Yes. Also ideas can be something like “lets move the search box to the menu bar to save space”. The question might be “do users use our search?” “what are the users trying to achieve with search?” and so on. Probably the solution falls out of the air once these questions are thought about and answered.

I once worked at a place where I pointed out the search sucked (with 100s of examples and references to research), at which point the UX guy said “do users use our search?” which it turned out, no, they didn't (which I thought was so obvious considering how bad it was) but since they didn't use it the solution fell out of the air that it didn't need to be improved.

on edit: typo correction

A braver solution is get rid if the search (less code to maintain) then talk to the users to solve their biggest problems

it was a streaming service. I believe search is probably the best interface if you know exactly what movie you want to watch.

Why didn't they use search? Could it be because it sucked so much? How were users actually finding the things they needed? Had there been any usability testing?

If your UX guy was anything like 90% of the ones I've dealt with, the answer to those questions would all boil down to "don't know, don't care, I'm focusing exclusively on this cool idea I came up with yesterday".

It appears I've been slightly "triggered", my apologies!

I was about to post exactly what you wrote.

Some contexts work better with structured navigation.

One that comes up off the top of my head is the electronic trial master file in FDA submissions.

Because it has a standard structure, users can navigate it faster through the structured navigation than through a freeform search.

I think other contexts this might hold true are when the content is browse oriented (how often do you use search on HN or reddit?) or it's a mobile context where a structured nav would allow less tapping than typing a search query.

Well, looks like the ideation process was cut shortly. A simple "why users don't use our search" could maybe steer the process into a useful direction (or conclude that it's because our users don't need search).

Of course, that all probably happened because somebody involved didn't want your product to have search. Process can not solve political problems.

I don't think anyone has ever said that. There is the famous Edison quote though:

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

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