71–80 of 346 posts
What once was ads everywhere, is now psychological gaming.
I hope someone comes up with a Google Extension, and maybe Apple with a new "Access Website" mode.
These messages are boring to be honest. Once you noticed them everywhere, game over for me. Time to move on.
"As an experiment, I went through a list of holiday weekend sales, and opened all the sites. They all — all, 100% — interrupted my attempt to give them some money." This is a good touchstone to use for "you've overoptimized your site, tone it back". I am also taken aback every time I'm on a site, I've got something in my shopping cart, I'm headed for the "check out" button, or I'm even on the checkout page , and some…
Like I'm sure many users sign up then drop out of your funnel but I'm part of an organization that's a paying customer. I'm already going to use your stuff. What possible business benefit could there be to you spamming me? If anything you're risking the inverse - it made me want to migrate away from the tool.
I've talked about this on HN but I'll say it again. A couple years ago, after being an Android fan for the better part of a decade, I finally bought myself an iPhone and pried myself away from Google's ecosystem wherever I could. And Apple didn't even need to do any work for me to make this decision. It was the years of abuse from Google that you experience when you decide to use a Google product or service. And a bi…
This shit drives my parents insane. Me too, when I have to help them. I've had to spend tens of seconds looking at a major screen in the phone app, of all things, to figure out WTF I'm looking at so I could help them figure out what was up. Re-arranged every update (or new phone) for absolutely no reason, terrible affordances, poor use of their own design language. Ugh.
I'd get them on iOS but they need larger screens and the $400 small iPhones (what I have) are already more expensive than they think a phone "should" cost, so they keep buying $200 Android phones about once a year (hoping the next one will be better) and not being able to use them because the UI is garbage.
I've talked about this on HN but I'll say it again. A couple years ago, after being an Android fan for the better part of a decade, I finally bought myself an iPhone and pried myself away from Google's ecosystem wherever I could. And Apple didn't even need to do any work for me to make this decision. It was the years of abuse from Google that you experience when you decide to use a Google product or service. And a bi…
"To me, A/B testing means you don't respect your users. You see them as just one factor in your money machine that can be poked and prodded to optimize how much money you can squeeze out of them. " Your perspective is extremely short-sighted. A/B testing can result in this type of behaviour but that's just poor A/B testing. Good A/B testing focuses on removing distractions from the experience and helping users derive…
A/B testing is local optimization. It should only be done on a mature(-ish) product when you have given up on finding a global minimum. Running experiments and A/B tests are popular because it is _guaranteed_ to give you signal. If you have a large engineering team and you're not sure how to filter the quality of results, gating everything through A/B tests is a well understood methodical way to ensure only positive…
I currently work in a game publishing company, here are 2 anecdotes from it
1. We run an A/B for game performance but we keep changing the bids for our games, and thus get varied quality of users, A/B tests don't really help in such a case 2. Once by mistake we ran the same creative on FB for 2 different ads.. both ended up having totally different metrics
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"To me, A/B testing means you don't respect your users. You see them as just one factor in your money machine that can be poked and prodded to optimize how much money you can squeeze out of them. " Your perspective is extremely short-sighted. A/B testing can result in this type of behaviour but that's just poor A/B testing. Good A/B testing focuses on removing distractions from the experience and helping users derive…
"You're doing it, but in some subtle but very important way that's not at all obvious to you, you're doing it wrong." How many tech startup patterns fit that? That's a sign that either the pattern does not generalize well or it's snake oil.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Quoted post unavailable.
"As an experiment, I went through a list of holiday weekend sales, and opened all the sites. They all — all, 100% — interrupted my attempt to give them some money." This is a good touchstone to use for "you've overoptimized your site, tone it back". I am also taken aback every time I'm on a site, I've got something in my shopping cart, I'm headed for the "check out" button, or I'm even on the checkout page , and some…
Speaking of 'sign up to our newsletter', one of the latest dark patterns I've found that astounded me was adding a checkbox to the login form [0], where you'd normally expect the 'remember me' checkbox to be. You almost click it out of muscle memory if you don't read what it says. [0] https://i.postimg.cc/HW89hs7r/Screenshot-2022-07-12-145957.p...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe if you are very aware of the fact that your goal and metric aren't totally aligned, but that often gets lost. As a result A/B testing for longer website visits can make websites that make it more obvious that the information you want is there, but also make the path to actually get it longer. A/B testing for engagement might promote divisive behavior and fights. A/B testing for read rate or clicks might lead to…
But that's just optimizing for bad metrics. At this point, anyone who thinks "engagement" and "time spent on page" are customer-positive metrics is in a different mental space than you and I. There's a lot of ineffable things that make up good customer experience that would be hard-to-impossible to A/B test, but it doesn't mean that A/B testing is "unsafe" just because it could be used to optimize for bad things any…
It doesn't excuse A/B testing simply being a poor tool among all you have access to. Talking to users and stakeholders, for example, provides infinitely more input. (Edit: yeah in many cases measuring what users do, directly watching or via analytics, is also useful.)