> > <http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080703/compared-to-what/>
Thank you very much, Steve, Chauncey! (Will reply in the post as well soon.) > One of the issues that happens > everyday is that someone on a product team will refer to poor > usability, but not highlight what the comparison is for this judgment > -- is it poor relative to the last version, user expectations, the > vice president's opinion, the major competitor..... In addition to > the object of comparison, there is also the common failure to clearly > express dimension of usability or user experience the comparison deals > with (learnability versus expert use/efficiency). So you could have a > dual problem where the object of comparison is not clear and the > dimension of interest is not explicit. Absolutely, and this seems to be all too common. > There is a book that deals with missing or inappropriate comparisons > in a book from 2001 (Chapter 4) that highlights the issue you wrote > about: Best, J. (2001). Damned lies and statistic. Bekeley, CA, > University of California Press. Thank you, saved. Looks like a nice complement to Tufte's remarks on that matter. > I routinely ask the questions "What is the goal of this (meeting, > project, brainstorming session...)?, but you bring up the point that > when a person makes a comparative statement, that we should ask what > the object of comparison is. Exactly. And I really see that a lot on news, even (or especially) when they just state that "women cause fewer traffic accidents than men" and then don't offer any numbers on how many women and men actually participate in traffic, and the meaning of these statements might change dramatically if there's a ratio of 1:10, 1:3, 1:1, or vice versa (so while recipients might think "women are safe drivers", the exact opposite might be the case). > Another twist on this issue would involve some of the cognitive biases > that can affect how we perceive data. Some of the work by Kahneman and > Tversky and others about common, but powerful cognitive biases like > the "availability heuristic" where people judge the liklihood of > things by their vividness (which overrides baseline statistical > information) and the law of small numbers. Which is an interesting observation, indeed. Best, Jens. -- Jens Meiert http://meiert.com/en/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
