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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

> I personally helped grow Facebook’s UXR team from a dozen to over 100, then did the same for Airbnb in the same amount of time it took Facebook/Meta to go from 100 to over 1000 researchers.

What the? I had no idea it was so colossal. I didn't even know UX "research" was a thing, as in, someone made their career out of it.

No wonder it takes 100 engineers to write a website, if it takes 100 researchers to dream up some coconuts for people lacking thumbs. Last I checked, humans haven't changed in centuries. The gestalt is all you need to "research" and understand the human perception, imho. Ok maybe in the field of VR, some research need to be made, but this seems like crazy amounts of people.

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When you have a website & an app that reach >1 Billion people a day there is a strong risk aversion that sets in. People are constantly trying to make improvements, add features, keep up with the competition etc, but the risk of making things worse is very high (A billion pennies a day is still more money than most people will see in their lives). Experimenting in the wild is no longer possible like it is for a startup, so instead a solid research program is needed to test and validate new features before launch. Yes having good designers would obviate a lot of the need for researchers, just like having good engineers would eliminate the need for QC. But realistically QC and UXR are both important parts of the product release process at a large company.

There's a lot of legitimate UI research. What foreground/background colors are readable (white/black and black/white perform about on par, with yellow/blue being the best IIRC), destructive actions shouldn't be next to constructive (at the minimum there should be a separator between 'Save' and 'Quit'), ...

Faffing about with hamburger menus and A/B testing isn't 'UX' research though.

> What foreground/background colors are readable (white/black and black/white perform about on par, with yellow/blue being the best IIRC), destructive actions shouldn't be next to constructive (at the minimum there should be a separator between 'Save' and 'Quit'), ...

Agreed, but hasn't all of this research already been done? I thought these are well understood already. A/B testing hamburger menus literally sounds insane to me

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