<story><title>Test your product on a crappy laptop</title><url>https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>telesilla</author><text>We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what&amp;#x27;s wrong or missing (outside of regular crash&amp;#x2F;feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it&amp;#x27;s a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never heard from, to understand what problems they had that we weren&amp;#x27;t solving, to get them energised enough to report to us. It&amp;#x27;s been very successful, engagement has gone up significantly.</text></item><item><author>animal_spirits</author><text>&amp;gt; British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician pointed out that the dramatic rise in hospital cases was because people were surviving injuries that previously would have killed them—before the introduction of steel the British Army used felt or leather as headwear material.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen this same story except with warplanes during the War. Story goes that an allied air force tried to improve the percentage of planes that would return from a bombing raid, so they inspected returning planes, found the places where they had holes in them and added extra layers of steel to those areas for the next bomb run; but this had no improvement on the percentage of planes that returned.&lt;p&gt;That is until a &amp;quot;statistician&amp;quot; realized that all of the places on the plane that they found holes in were actually parts of the plane that could get hit and survive and return. They then started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes they found no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were hit the plane would get shot down and not return. After this change they started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of planes returning from a raid.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the true source of these stories?&lt;p&gt;Regardless, it really opened my eyes to how changing your perspective on the cause of the problem can help find the best solution, and to this day I still think of this story when solving a problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MrFoof</author><text>Way back in the day I was a lone IT guy in a distributor&amp;#x2F;wholesaler, and part of that was creating line of business apps to do some real heavy lifting, extending existing ones, and creating utilities to tie other apps together.  In a tiny company of maybe 40 people, where even an underpaid IT guy was still an extravagance (but was adding huge value).&lt;p&gt;Periodically I&amp;#x27;d ask to shadow someone for a day or two.  At some points, even asking if I could do their task and have them watch me to confirm I was doing it correctly.&lt;p&gt;What you would learn from this was amazing.  All sorts of inefficiencies that people would quietly accept, because it was still way better than the previous state.&lt;p&gt;Then a week or two later I&amp;#x27;d roll out the update, and get huge thank yous from accounting, or sales, or the warehouse because I completely trivialized some previous common task.  What used to take 45 seconds now takes 2 because all the work is done for them 99.9% of the time and they just need to confirm it&amp;#x27;s correct (or correct the odd edge case).  The computer became this increasingly magical tool they loved more and more.</text></comment>
<story><title>Test your product on a crappy laptop</title><url>https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>telesilla</author><text>We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what&amp;#x27;s wrong or missing (outside of regular crash&amp;#x2F;feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it&amp;#x27;s a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never heard from, to understand what problems they had that we weren&amp;#x27;t solving, to get them energised enough to report to us. It&amp;#x27;s been very successful, engagement has gone up significantly.</text></item><item><author>animal_spirits</author><text>&amp;gt; British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician pointed out that the dramatic rise in hospital cases was because people were surviving injuries that previously would have killed them—before the introduction of steel the British Army used felt or leather as headwear material.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen this same story except with warplanes during the War. Story goes that an allied air force tried to improve the percentage of planes that would return from a bombing raid, so they inspected returning planes, found the places where they had holes in them and added extra layers of steel to those areas for the next bomb run; but this had no improvement on the percentage of planes that returned.&lt;p&gt;That is until a &amp;quot;statistician&amp;quot; realized that all of the places on the plane that they found holes in were actually parts of the plane that could get hit and survive and return. They then started adding extra steel to the parts of the planes they found no holes or damage assuming that if those parts were hit the plane would get shot down and not return. After this change they started seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of planes returning from a raid.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the true source of these stories?&lt;p&gt;Regardless, it really opened my eyes to how changing your perspective on the cause of the problem can help find the best solution, and to this day I still think of this story when solving a problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vkk8</author><text>This makes sense. The sort of users that leave any kind of feedback or even hang around long enough for you to gather statistics are those who think the product is pretty good, but there are just these small issues that they hope will get fixed. The users who think your product is complete crap try it, stop using it very early and never leave feedback or statistics for you to analyze.</text></comment>