UX nerd

You’re surely familiar with the talk about how designers should not consider ourselves to be average users because we’re experts. There are many anecdotes about systems or products that are perfect for us in so many ways (effectiveness, efficiency, aesthetics) and yet fail to please users. That’s why we run user tests, and that’s why we have shifted from good old “usability” to the more subjective “user experience”. But an interesting by-product of this well-meant attitude is that we (designers) have grown to consider ourselves above the influence of such whimsical subjectivities. Every designer I know is always perfectly capable of producing a rational explanation of why something is good or bad: we have formal methods for it, we have been trained to do it, we make a living out of it.

That said, this is what happened to me today…

I was working on the report for our research on emoticons and I had to do some linear regressions to check for some trends. I had left my PC at the university so I was using Excel on my Mac. I try to avoid using Excel on my Mac, because the Mac version is awful, so I had no idea how to enter an array formula (and, no, replacing CTRL with Cmd didn’t work). So I google it. Google is the best search engine, right? With all these other people clinging to Yahoo and Live Search/Bing because <insert subjectivity here>. I try to find how to use linest in Excel for Mac for about an hour and finally give up: “I’ll do it tomorrow at the university”. So, I decide to spend some time on Reddit before I move on to my tabbed browsing prototype. There, the following link catches my attention:

I decide to try the thing although I was sure that Google would be better. Honestly, I was bored: Reddit is no longer what it used to be. So I click on it and I decide to look for “how to use linest in excel os x” and take a quick look at the results (where of course I no longer hope to find anything useful) and voilà… there it was! I vote the search engine that produced the result wondering if I had failed to search for such a simple combination of words before. However, to my surprise, it turned out that I had just voted for Yahoo :S

I guess I could draw any number of interesting conclusions from this (starting with an interesting position 42 in that Reddit submission), but unfortunately now I can go on with the regressions I need for my report…