Accessibility

Jeremy’s comments on Open Prioritization, which is an experiment in crowd-funding prioritization of new features in browsers.

when numbers are used as the justification, you’re playing the numbers game from then on.

He is speaking about monetary justification in arguments, but I saw a corollary in data-driven decisions. Once you make a product decision based purely on data, it becomes hard to ever deviate from or change that decision. “But the data said we should...” is the argument. Or “what does the data say?” becomes the leading question on decision making. Data is a cruel master.

He continues:

You’ll probably have to field questions like “Well, how many screen reader users are visiting our site anyway?” (To which the correct answer is “I don’t know and I don’t care”

Sometimes I wish more product decisions were made on principles and values like this more than the crutch of data.

If you tie the justification ... to data, then what happens should the data change? ... If your justification isn’t tied to numbers, then it hardly matters what the numbers say (though it does admitedly feel good to have your stance backed up)...The fundamental purpose of [your product] needs to be shared, not swapped out based on who’s doing the talking.