I think that’s the whole point of the Valve screen resolution section. The data that is collected is what users are actually using, whether in-game or native desktop. Correlating that data to what users are wanting shows they do not match. Even though users say they want higher resolutions, usage shows nearly 40% of 1.3 million people are in 1280x960. Whichever the data is capturing, from in-game or desktop (meaning they cant support higher resolution anyways), why would Valve spend resources to support higher resolutions when only 1% people are going to use it.
This is a great example of not listening to the users. Going so far as to take “don’t listen to your users” literally is a bit much, but the point is the user, although having great input, is not always the most appropriate or high priority action to take.
Using Valve data is a joke I hope? You can’t really take conclusions from that. Or does every customer you have ever worked for, has Steam installed on his workstation and plays HL a lot? If you would have ever played it (as mentioned by somebody else before), you would have known that most players lower their resolution while playing to get better framerates.
Changing stuff based upon player feedback is widely used imao. You’re giving the example from Halo. But let’s take a bigger and better one: WoW (played by millions of users). Blizzard listens to the users to see if they can find a possible imbalance ingame. When they suspect there is one, they start investigating if that’s actually true and fix it if needed.
Conclusion: Always listen to your users! You’ll get kicked in the nuts hard by not doing it. However: Don’t trust your users blindly!
Great post, I 100% agree. Exactly, users do not always know what they really need, but considering users’ benifits and understanding users’ feedback can help us develop better products.
I can not agree more on the subject of listening too much to your users.
I’ve come to realize that I’m more of a reducer than an enhancer of “my” users ideas.
I’ve often found my role, as a consultant, to be
Customer: “I don’t really know what I want. Tell me what I want”
If/when everything goes wrong: “You told me I wanted this, you were wrong. I can blame you”
Ok you say “Make sure your application or website is capturing user activity in a useful, meaningful way”…
but what is this useful meaningful way? On a java web interface… what’is the way for to log users activity from remote?
I really don’t have idea about that…
I think its difficult to find feedback channel on Google site. There is some, but I didn’t find actual pure plain feedback form. Did I just miss it (bad user interface) or there isn’t such? I think they would do better if there was the feedback form even if they didn’t read the feedback, because now they got me angry because I searched and searched wasting time but didn’t find. http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/index.html
Also, extra resolutions can go way beyond being an extra menu item. You have to make sure everything looks as good at high resolution as it does at medium res - that means high quality artwork that most people won’t see - and there are the performance implications. An engine may be great at something like 1200x1000, but does it scale to 1600x1200?
The users might want higher resolution, but are playing in low, because its faster. So if the higher resolution was faster, more people would use it. This applies better to graphics settings. I like highly detailed graphics with waving grass, but cannot use much of them because my computer is not super fast. Because of that, I end up wanting more games that are utilizing low graphics but still look good.
Second Life is another example. It is complicated platform so it is buggy, laggy, and has lots of annoying features. But they cannot do much about it because they do not know how and because it is so complicated. Still they add new features, that in my opinion are buggy and not made properly. They end up having buggy, laggy, and annoying system with buggy and annoying new features. Then people get angry, but many continue using it because there are no good choices in the market.