General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs the internet now just one big human experiment?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/29/internet-human-experiment-facebook-dating-sites?CMP=ema_565In a Monday blog post entitled I'm not making this up "We Experiment On Human Beings!" the site's co-founder, Christian Rudder, essentially told us to face the facts of our modern world ... at least as he sees them:
[G]uess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work.
Human experimentation is definitely part of how websites work, in a way, because all online services of considerable size do something called A/B testing seeing how users respond to tweaks, then adjusting accordingly. But that doesn't mean sites can, do or should routinely and deliberately deceive their users or customers.
Newsjock
(11,733 posts)The same amoral, no-ethics types who flocked to Wall Street in the go-getting '80s have flocked to Silicon Valley in the 21st century, and they are bringing the same type of destructive hypercapitalism, this time tinged with a helping of superiority-drenched neolibertarianism that proclaims they are better than everyone else, especially "the poors."
TlalocW
(15,393 posts)*Writes down some cryptic notes from behind the safety of a two-way mirror*
TlalocW
Xithras
(16,191 posts)Get the application "perfect", deliberately break it for a small subset of users, and measure the efficacy delta between the groups. If everything is working properly, there should be a huge difference between the two. If not, your application sucks and needs to be re-engineered.
We have a guy here at work who's entire job is built around efficacy and usability testing. He gets paid six figures to work out interesting ways to break client sites to ensure that various features are actually working the way we expect them to.
FWIW, you can't inform the clients or use focus groups for this sort of thing, because informing them or getting consent can create selection biases or other behavioral changes that can make the test group non-representative of the typical user. To get around that, most sites just bury a clause in their terms of service granting them the right to do this sort of thing. By using the site, you're consenting to the testing.