You should measure it

These days I’m working for a stealth startup in a very early stage. One of the best team I’ve ever worked with.

A couple of days ago we had an interesting discussion about the UX and the priority of an additional feature. I’m talking in the specific about a map view of the items additional to the default list view, but it doesn’t really matter.

In this case my point is very easy: since we cannot measure the impact of this UX feature (because we basically have no user base yet for an A/B test) it’s not important by default. I think this approach should be used the often you can: if you cannot measure something, consider it irrelevant.

When you take decisions driven from your gut, you must be aware that you’re more likely to fall into cognitive bias, so consider the costs of your decision, be aware that you’re gambling and if you really really want to go on (or you have to), at least use a conservative money/resource management approach.

This also means that you should put in place a measurement system that will help you taking decisions.

Collecting information and the ability to make sense of it is what will make the differece and help you to be successful.

In case of UI/UX we’re talking about A/B testing, if you’re doing agile it’s the retrospective, if you’re a devop its a monitoring system.

Whatever your job is, follow the scientific method: 1) observe the world, 2) make a hypothesis, 3) validate the hypothesis. You’re never right against the evidence, if you cannot validate your hyphothesis you gamble.