I remember talking to a product designer before. I brought up the idea of me looking for ways to do things more quickly that might be worse for the user. Their response was something along the lines of “I mean, as a designer I’m always going to advocate for whatever is best for the user.”
I think that “apples-to-oranges” is a good analogy for what is wrong about that. Here’s what I mean.
Suppose there is a form and the design is to have inline validation (nice error messages next to the input fields). And suppose that “global” validation would be simpler (an error message in one place saying “here’s what you did wrong”). Inline is better for users, but comparing it straight up to global would be an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Why? Because the inline version takes longer. Suppose the inline version takes two days and the global version takes one.
Here’s where the apples-to-oranges analogy comes in: you can’t compare something that takes one day to something that takes two days purely on the grounds of user experience. That is apples-to-oranges. For it to be apples-to-apples, you’d have to compare a) inline validation to b) global validation + whatever else that can be done in the second day. In other words, (b) has to include the right-hand side of the plus sign. Without the right-hand side, it is apples-to-oranges.
When better is apples to oranges
I remember talking to a product designer before. I brought up the idea of me looking for ways to do things more quickly that might be worse for the user. Their response was something along the lines of “I mean, as a designer I’m always going to advocate for whatever is best for the user.”
I think that “apples-to-oranges” is a good analogy for what is wrong about that. Here’s what I mean.
Suppose there is a form and the design is to have inline validation (nice error messages next to the input fields). And suppose that “global” validation would be simpler (an error message in one place saying “here’s what you did wrong”). Inline is better for users, but comparing it straight up to global would be an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Why? Because the inline version takes longer. Suppose the inline version takes two days and the global version takes one.
Here’s where the apples-to-oranges analogy comes in: you can’t compare something that takes one day to something that takes two days purely on the grounds of user experience. That is apples-to-oranges. For it to be apples-to-apples, you’d have to compare a) inline validation to b) global validation + whatever else that can be done in the second day. In other words, (b) has to include the right-hand side of the plus sign. Without the right-hand side, it is apples-to-oranges.