I can see why this was done, but I think this is a case where the engineers (or engineer *cough* Brad *cough*) should have pulled in their usability person before pushing it live :p
What a waste of money that would be! What do you think would happen when they pulled in a "usability person" -- a controlled rollout to 1% or 10% of LiveJournal users selected randomly? For something that has about zero customer impact? No-one's going to stop paying LiveJournal because the "Current Location" field is linked to Google Maps; why not see how all the users use it, and react from there?
Usability studies are cool and have geek cred, but that doesn't mean they're good business decisions, especially for a single trivial feature.
(And remember, much of LiveJournal is just as smart as you are. You figured out that you might want to specify something more specific than "Home" in the location, and I suspect you've also figured out that if someone else writes "Home" it's not worth clicking on. Everyone else is figuring that out right now too.)
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Date: 2006-03-30 02:22 pm (UTC)What a waste of money that would be! What do you think would happen when they pulled in a "usability person" -- a controlled rollout to 1% or 10% of LiveJournal users selected randomly? For something that has about zero customer impact? No-one's going to stop paying LiveJournal because the "Current Location" field is linked to Google Maps; why not see how all the users use it, and react from there?
Usability studies are cool and have geek cred, but that doesn't mean they're good business decisions, especially for a single trivial feature.
(And remember, much of LiveJournal is just as smart as you are. You figured out that you might want to specify something more specific than "Home" in the location, and I suspect you've also figured out that if someone else writes "Home" it's not worth clicking on. Everyone else is figuring that out right now too.)