Are you suggesting companies spend 10x on manual user research? Are you willing to pay more for a product because of increased costs to understand what users actually want?
Yes, I expect them to do manual user research. And “making the users pay” is the wrong way to frame this - product pricing and labor aren’t that tightly correlated.
Besides, When we bought magazines the editors didn’t know what stories people were reading or what words you were spending more time reading. When you buy a tool the manufacturer doesn’t know how you use it. Why software gets a free pass at getting all that data for free without asking is beyond me. What I expect are for regulations to eventually hit this industry.
> product pricing and labor aren’t that tightly correlated.
If you're the staff accountant, sure. You're technically correct.
If you're the CFO and I'm trying to convince you we need to spend $1M on user research instead of $100K, you can be sure this is taken into account when modeling monetization strategies to recoup R&D costs.
Call me stuffy, but somehow I think that, for example, Ms Office managed to have more user-friendly UX (Clippy and performance aside) back when they had 0 telemetry.
>Are you suggesting companies spend 10x on manual user research? Are you willing to pay more for a product because of increased costs to understand what users actually want?
Move your analytics to the server and stop tracking my every mouse move and page scroll. Needing to know that stuff suggests you're either creepy or that your organisation is saturated with marketing and SEO wonks.
User research and analytics are two entirely different things. Your product will suffer if you neglect the first.
> Are you suggesting companies spend 10x on manual user research?
if they want to make their product better, that's what they should do, instead of drawing wrong conclusions from the limited data that telemetry gives you.
> Are you willing to pay more for a product because of increased costs to understand what users actually want?
It's your business. Add telemetry, have it turned off by a significant amount of your users which might not be an average representation of your user base.
So your go ahead and optimize for a biased subset, maybe even interpret some of that data wrong, and before you know it, for iterations later some fancy startup is stealing the show, because they simply read all the detailed complaints about your software on reddit and HN instead of jacking off to analytics data.
Are you suggesting companies spend 10x on manual user research? Are you willing to pay more for a product because of increased costs to understand what users actually want?