No I was absolutely not planning on adding real accounts. But people went ahead and wrote me emails asking for the feature:
Example: "Good job for a draft website. Personally I'm playing in different leagues and I'd really appreciate to have an account to avoid multiple input and multiple links ..."
This is what made me think it was a real need in the community, which was clearly wrong.
You could avoid multiple input and multiple links with cookies. That wouldn't require a login.
Users might not even know what a cookie is, so they don't ask for one and instead they say the simplest thing that comes to mind: an account. They don't know what the options are in technology. They barely know what they need, and they most definitely don't know what they want.
People do not know what they want. They barely know what
they need, but they definitely do not know what they
want. They're conditioned by the limited imagination of
what is possible.
- Massimo Vignelli
That strikes me as arrogance. Henry Ford's famous quote is taken as dogma, and the almighty designer is worshipped, the one who deigns to figure out what the clueless user really wants and give it to him. This is especially bad when the user in question is asking to have something restored which had been removed in the name of design. Or the same could be said about "developers": those clueless users will take what we give them, and they'll like it! This is the mindset that leads to the widely hated redesigns of Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ integration, etc. It's almost like a new caste system in the online world.
> This is the mindset that leads to the widely hated redesigns of Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ integration, etc.
Pretty sure all these companies are heavily A/B testing every change they make, and would immediately abandon any new design if it decreased engagement or retention even slightly.
These changes are "hated" by a vocal minority who loves to complain about change to show how much the liked the old version. They don't quit using the product, though. And if you ask their opinion again even three months later (which is another thing big companies tend to do), they'll have completely forgotten what the difference was between the two.
Of course, some people do quit a service after any given change, no matter how innocuous—they just disappear without saying anything. But changes, even change for change's sake, also tends to increase signups. So in practice, it's just a question of whether the positives outweigh the negatives of the change. And only real usage data can answer that, not customer surveys—and especially not customer exit surveys.
Maybe the correct view is that no one, whether users or designers, is always right or always wrong. The important thing is to try things out, see what happens, then adapt and try again. To generalise based on the past successes or failures of users or designers is probably a mistake.
Example: "Good job for a draft website. Personally I'm playing in different leagues and I'd really appreciate to have an account to avoid multiple input and multiple links ..."
This is what made me think it was a real need in the community, which was clearly wrong.