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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Not just software developers. I was working on a medical device and visited doctors' offices to see how and where they stored their medication (e.g. for how could we make our dispenser more prominent without getting in the way?). We also filmed our investigators holding various prototype devices to see how they picked them up, how they were balanced, how they felt in small and large hands etc.

Universally we were told that nobody had ever asked them anything like that before.

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I've never understood how people can design and build anything (software, hardware, whatever) without understanding how it's used. Dogfooding is great (and so many places don't even do that!) but you don't really know what you need to build until you sit down with your users and actually watch them work.

It's really difficult to understand how a large complicated appplication should be used if you have no use for it yourself. I spent most of the last twenty years workin g on design software for transformers (the electrical kind not the newly fashionabloe machine learning stuff) but I have never designed a transformer in my life. There is no way of dogfooding such a product the developers have no use for it at all.

So we do our best, observe the users, try to provide shortcuts and hints. But watching a user work is really difficult too because in a large application the users don't all use all of the application all of the time so getting a realistic picture of the whole use of the program is extremely time consuming which means expensive and the client departments just want to use it, they very often aren't interested in optimizing it.

Well, I've never been called to participate in a political survey poll thing, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen to people. There's a lot of doctor's offices out there. What was your sample size?

Small, a few hundred, but was in a medical speciality so it was a reasonable number. In addition, that pool included all of our clinical investigators, the “thought leaders” you’d think most likely to have been consulted.

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