If the great philosophers had been user interface designers (pt. 2, Plato)
Plato was a vocal advocate of logfile analysis. In his famous Simile of the Cave, he explains that the web designer is like a man, sitting in a cave, and logfiles are like shadows cast against the walls by users carrying lanters before an opening in that cave.
Of course, he conceeded, one might learn so much more if one was to study the users directly. However, the discovery of user exploration was still a few centuries off.
Plato also thought that for every abandoned shopping cart, there exists a befuddled user and that if one were to find a way to put the two of them together again, they would form an androgynous, which, many believe, means loyal customer in Platon’s hometown dialect.
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