This phenomenon is very familiar to me as a UX designer, because it often makes bugs or design flaws way, way more difficult to learn about than should (one would naively imagine) be the case.
Specifically: suppose I release some piece of software, which has some bug, or usability flaw, etc.; and suppose this problem does not manifest for me, in my own testing, but does manifest for many other users, on a regular basis. One might expect that a flood of complaints, bug reports, angry tweets, irate emails, etc., would nigh-instantly alert me to the problem’s existence… but instead there is naught but silence, and I remain blissfully unaware that there’s anything wrong.
Then some time passes, and—by sheer accident!—I discover that large numbers of users have been living with this problem for weeks or months or (horror!) years, and just haven’t said anything… because they’re used to technology just… not working very well, or having bugs, etc.; and so they shrug and treat it as “one of those things”, and do some workaround, or just tolerate the problem, and never consider that, actually, there is something wrong with this picture, and that it is possible for this problem (indeed, most such problems) to not exist, and that complaining might yield results.
As they say—many such cases! (Here, for example, is gwern tweeting about a case when a website he built had 460,000 unique visitors before word got to him before he realized, after checking personally, that the layout was broken on mobile devices!)
EDIT: Corrected the gwern anecdote—it was even worse than I remembered.
before word got to him that the layout was broken on mobile devices
Emphasizing the point even more—word didn’t get to me. I just thought to myself, ‘the layout might not be good on mobile. I ought to check.’ (It was not good.)
This phenomenon is very familiar to me as a UX designer, because it often makes bugs or design flaws way, way more difficult to learn about than should (one would naively imagine) be the case.
Specifically: suppose I release some piece of software, which has some bug, or usability flaw, etc.; and suppose this problem does not manifest for me, in my own testing, but does manifest for many other users, on a regular basis. One might expect that a flood of complaints, bug reports, angry tweets, irate emails, etc., would nigh-instantly alert me to the problem’s existence… but instead there is naught but silence, and I remain blissfully unaware that there’s anything wrong.
Then some time passes, and—by sheer accident!—I discover that large numbers of users have been living with this problem for weeks or months or (horror!) years, and just haven’t said anything… because they’re used to technology just… not working very well, or having bugs, etc.; and so they shrug and treat it as “one of those things”, and do some workaround, or just tolerate the problem, and never consider that, actually, there is something wrong with this picture, and that it is possible for this problem (indeed, most such problems) to not exist, and that complaining might yield results.
As they say—many such cases! (Here, for example, is gwern tweeting about a case when a website he built had 460,000 unique visitors
before word got to himbefore he realized, after checking personally, that the layout was broken on mobile devices!)EDIT: Corrected the gwern anecdote—it was even worse than I remembered.
Emphasizing the point even more—word didn’t get to me. I just thought to myself, ‘the layout might not be good on mobile. I ought to check.’ (It was not good.)
… the situation was so disheartening that in my memory of it I mentally substituted something more palatable!
(Fixed, thanks.)