Another rant
Jul. 22nd, 2019 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealSo you know that saying, "one death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic"? Apparently that's...also a business model.
Well, not in the death sense. For context, I'm doing an internship/career skills building thing with other autistic students/recent graduates, and at the moment it's very slow-paced. Basically the premise is "pretend we work for this company and need to design a new product, what do you do." Well, you can't turn us loose and allow us to dig into research on our own, that would be terrible. So we have to listen through these case studies of sample customers and then regurgitate back the exact same information in who/what/where/when/why format, and then experiment with post-it notes to be like "what can we conclude about this person"?
Based on the stuff we've been doing earlier, at some point we're going to be given a big spreadsheet and use software to sort it (which is nothing I couldn't do in Excel/the open-source equivalent, and faster), to be like "okay, what percentage of this data set is a senior citizen? what percent of those live alone and see their adult children at least once a month? based on this, we should tell our boss that we have a market of about X million people and should target accordingly."
But at this point we're just like "here is a sample user, named Betty, she is 75 but hip and down with the kids and their technology." Better not actually dig into the data, let's just look at once cute story and try to extrapolate from there! Like, I feel as if this is exactly the kind of "how to neurotypical" cognitive bias we should be brought in to compensate for, and instead they're extolling it like it's Business 101.
Well, not in the death sense. For context, I'm doing an internship/career skills building thing with other autistic students/recent graduates, and at the moment it's very slow-paced. Basically the premise is "pretend we work for this company and need to design a new product, what do you do." Well, you can't turn us loose and allow us to dig into research on our own, that would be terrible. So we have to listen through these case studies of sample customers and then regurgitate back the exact same information in who/what/where/when/why format, and then experiment with post-it notes to be like "what can we conclude about this person"?
Based on the stuff we've been doing earlier, at some point we're going to be given a big spreadsheet and use software to sort it (which is nothing I couldn't do in Excel/the open-source equivalent, and faster), to be like "okay, what percentage of this data set is a senior citizen? what percent of those live alone and see their adult children at least once a month? based on this, we should tell our boss that we have a market of about X million people and should target accordingly."
But at this point we're just like "here is a sample user, named Betty, she is 75 but hip and down with the kids and their technology." Better not actually dig into the data, let's just look at once cute story and try to extrapolate from there! Like, I feel as if this is exactly the kind of "how to neurotypical" cognitive bias we should be brought in to compensate for, and instead they're extolling it like it's Business 101.
