“They would have said faster horses” – An example of asking wrong questions

https://codarium.substack.com/p/they-would-have-said-faster-horses

by artembugara • 6 years ago

32 32 6 years ago

codarium.substack.com

catalogia2• 6 years ago

Here's my problem with that quote: it comes from the same man who also said "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."

Considering that context, I view his horses quote as another expression of his contempt for what other people want, even when they want something reasonable.

Also, Henry Ford did not invent the car. Cars existed before he mass produced them; had he asked people what they wanted, people probably would have said "a car I can afford" not "a faster horse."

setr2• 6 years ago

It's not that unreasonable -- a reasonable number of reasonable configuration options produces a very unreasonable application.

catalogia2• 6 years ago

I think it was probably reasonable for him to only offer his car in black due to mass manufacturing logistics of the time. However I think he could have explained this, instead of making some pithy remark about other people having wrong opinions or something.

parsimo2010• 6 years ago

Here's my problem with people that have heard a few popular quotes and think they understand the whole story: for the first several years the Model T came in several different colors. It switched to black only because of demand, then eventually they went back to offering multiple colors when they could.

Ford only switched to making black cars only when the demand was so high that the production lines couldn't keep up. It wasn't contempt for the customer that made him do it, his choice was either to streamline the production process or to raise prices so that demand would drop. The selling point of his cars were that the common man could afford them, not that they were colorful. He made an appropriate business choice, not some user-hostile choice.

apostacy• 6 years ago

But I think that quote is usually invoked by people when they blatantly disregard the wishes of their customers.

It's just a way to justify "screw the users, they have no idea what they want, I know what they want, because I'm a genius like Henry Ford, and my users are stupid."

I heard that Steve Jobs was fond if saying that. And sure, Steve Jobs had a lot of success, but people don't remember his failures as much. Steve Jobs was responsible for the Apple III, a fiasco for Apple computers because Jobs insisted on not having fans in it.

He was adamant that the era of fans in computers was over, and the Apple III was a disaster that kept overheating. I am sure that when engineers tried talking Jobs into reconsidering, they just gave them that Henry Ford platitude and dismissed them.

I have heard so many times disastrously unpopular UX redesigns and dark patterns were justified with pigheaded platitudes about how stupid users are.

So regardless of what Henry Ford himself actually meant at the time, the perception today is that it was justification for disregarding customers.

timmins• 6 years ago

Part of the reason you have a problem with the same man making both of those quotes is that the "faster horse" quote was likely not said by Henry Ford.

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/10/10/fact-check-henry-ford-q...

https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast

ogre_codes2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure who this blog is talking to, it feels like classic straw-man argument. Ford never said the car wouldn't solve anyone's problem, in fact his pitch was that the car was better than a faster horse.

artembugara2• 6 years ago

Agree with you. I think this blog post is about the same.

Whatever Ford said, this quote is famous (most likely he did not say that, btw)

ogre_codes2• 6 years ago

Whatever Ford said, this quote is famous (most likely he did not say that, btw)

I just took that bit at face value, but you are right... and makes this blog post even less palatable.

fwoty• 6 years ago

"Usually, I hear that from people who build an app/product/software without a market validation"

It's an argument against using the quote to suggest that you don't need to validate ideas against real users.

btschaegg• 6 years ago

There is a quote by Don Norman on the matter that I like very much (from "The Design of Everyday Things"):

Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment.

Spartan-S63• 6 years ago

Hm... sounds a lot like the scientific process and basic research :)

bob1029• 6 years ago

In my experience, requirements are never fully developed until after many iterations have been undertaken.

You can never perfectly plan how an application or any other arbitrary convenience should be in isolation of the user. You can certainly get very close, but there is something about actually using a thing that cannot ever be fully simulated in an authentic way. The way a knob feels to a person is not a thing you can ever truly encapsulate and store in a database field.

Constant feedback and iterating on that feedback is how you arrive at ideal outcomes. The art of developing software or other high-quality user experiences is a very iterative, chicken-egg-style problem. It is a human problem. Being prepared to throw it all away and start over each time you iterate is one of the most powerful things you could ever hope to do. Just keep a copy of what you tried before as a stick to lean on. Each time you iterate, that stick should be getting stronger. Eventually you wind up with a bunch of sticks and you can start to chop them up, reorganize them, and build a proper structure.

mc32• 6 years ago

Also it misses the point. During the USSR’s and China’s attempts at grand projects often times they knew about mechanized machinery, but that solution wasn’t always applicable (too costly, diverted too many resources, or they had ample idle hands that weren’t easily deployed to something more productive).

HugoDaniel• 6 years ago

love the ending about not being gpt3 generated :) nice touch

artembugara2• 6 years ago

Then, GPT-4 will be using this blog to train, and will be able to reproduce even this. Oh wait...

jameslk• 6 years ago

I have this fear I'm reading GPT-3 produced text now whenever I read an article or comment that seems to lack a lot of context or goes off on weird tangents. It's a unique feeling, similar to experiencing gaslighting or the uncanny valley of text. I think this new phenomenon needs a name

fultonfaknem42• 6 years ago

Confusion. You're experiencing confusion.

I get the exact same thing.

csours• 6 years ago

Stated another way: Listen to your customers, but don't feel obligated to do exactly what they say.

Just ask “What is your top problem?”

People will answer this question in the form of imagined solutions or improvements to existing systems, so it's not a matter of simply asking a different question, it's a matter of digging into the answers and needs.

cgrealy• 6 years ago

It's your classic 5 whys, except in this case you can get to the root cause in probably 2 hops

"I need a faster horse" "why?" "so I can travel faster" "why?" "so I can get to where I need to be quicker"

BelleOfTheBall• 6 years ago

Yeah, you're given an idea of what the people want but of course you're supposed to iterate on it. Like when you ask an average worker - what would make your life better? They'll likely say higher wages. It doesn't meant they just need a pay increase (although that too, of course.) They need more stability, they need certainty and a financial safety net. Anybody asking this question just needs to be aware of the follow-up - extrapolating. It's that simple.

jvreagan• 6 years ago

Jeff Bezos says this exact thing in a slightly different way: "If you don't listen to your customers, you will fail. If you only listen to your customers, you will fail."

chongli2• 6 years ago

This is also known as the XY-problem [1]. People want a solution to X, and they think Y is the way to solve it. But they’re having trouble doing Y and so they ask for help with Y.

The problem is that Y is not the best way to solve X and you’re confused about why they’d ever want to do Y. Life would be much easier if they had just asked for help solving X.

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378

detaro• 6 years ago

Is there a name for the reverse, when Stack Overflow assumes you don't understand your constraints and propose all possible solutions to what they think is X that aren't a solution to Y?

chongli2• 6 years ago

I don't know about the specific case of the reverse of the XY-problem, but in general I'd say it fits within the law of unintended consequences [1], the cobra effect [2], and as a sort of qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) version of Campbell's law [3]. Very interesting stuff!

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/french/unin...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

klavinski• 6 years ago

It has been called the YX problem a few times on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23599250

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842747

catchmeifyoucan• 6 years ago

Faster horses is still a challenge for solutions that aren't always obvious to people. A vision isn't always the one the customer wants. An obvious solution isn't always the best either. One way I found to help overcome this barrier is testing for symptoms based on assumptions about your new feature set and what you aim to solve:

Cars have wheels. Okay,tell me about your problems with horses and the way they move?

Cars don't need rest. Okay, tell me about your problems with stopping to feed your horses?

Cars are faster. Okay, walk me through a time when you were late to something - why so?

It's easy for a customer to answer all three answers separately, but they'll struggle to put them all together and come up with "car". They've never seen it before. However, you can still validate because their problems are very real. When you have your concept, you can show it, and then validate the final solution.

OldHand2018• 6 years ago

No one could think about cars at that time. Correct.

Ford Motor Company was Henry Ford's 3rd car company, and by that time there were probably 15+ car companies in Detroit alone.

As a curious aside, his second car company is still around too. He left after serious disputes with his financial backers; they decided to liquidate the company and brought another experienced Detroit engineer in to do so, but he recognized the value and convinced them to continue, renaming it the Cadillac Automobile Company.

nemosaltat• 6 years ago

P.S. This article is not GPT-3 generated

This stands out to me. When I frequented reddit, folks would often preface a post with some sort of pre-apology about their English. Now, when I read articles with strange grammatical features, my first thought is “what are the chances this was generated.”

Recent Personal Anecdote: While struggling to get OS X to run in a VM, on AMD architecture I came across several unattributed guides with informative, topical content where the language was just a little “off.” It occurred to me that they might be ESL or translated, but none had any attribution. For some reason it finally struck me as odd that such detailed, technical guides wouldn’t mention an author or at least acknowledge “The team at xyzWebCollaboritive.”

Several guides under the same domain name contained relavent information on my very specific search topic, with langue that was “uncannily” askew.

Is this just me?

chernov• 6 years ago

Google simply generates the guides on demand and throws a link somewhere in the search results for you :)

foxyv• 6 years ago

As a person who has ridden horses I would say horses that don't poop. After that, horses that don't throw you randomly, need constant vet checkups, make tons of dust, smell funny, or bite. Far in the distant horizon of the problems with horses is speed.

“They would have said faster horses” – An example of asking wrong questions

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