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Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#378
Originally Posted by fms View Post
"100 bloggers is not a market" is a common argument used to blow off any ideas of user participation in development process. It is, of course, true that 100 people do not represent the whole market. Thus, blindly following what these people say would be unwise. Nevertheless, when you have got 100 people actively using your product on the daily basis, you should at least listen to what these people have to say about the product. They are essentially testing your product for free, finding new use cases and optimal device configurations. Why not use their experience as one of input components during device design is not clear to me. For example, when active 100 users are telling you that they want a dpad, the chances are pretty high that the remaining N million potential users will also want dpads.
You fail to see the bias in there. The 100 customers that bought joystick cars tend to like the joysticks in their cars. It's both a bias of accepting certain solutions, and another bias of growing accustomed to whatever you are currently using.

Best practice is to take the entire population of potential consumers - certainly including the current users - and to test amongst them as a whole. The dpad discussion has been discussed to death, but your assumption in this case is simply not correct. Naturally the results of any dpad study also depend on the hardware and the SW running in that hardware. It's about what kind of user experience we want to provide to the users.
 

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