Roku recently released a software update that added AirPlay support [0].

If you have iOS, you can beam HBO Max content from iPhone to TV. Not as ideal as having the HBO app on the Roku OS itself, but better than having to buy extra hardware.

[0] https://blog.roku.com/apple-airplay-homekit

Which metrics would one track to remain on the ethical path, if any?

I would say: talk to your customers, find out what their needs are and try to make your product better at fulfilling them. Focusing on metrics is going back in the direction of treating your customers as means to an end: like grain to be harvested or sheep to be shorn.

Instead try to think of your customers the way an old barber would think of his clients: as friends with individual needs who trust your experience in a particular problem domain.

Of course, this approach is extremely unlikely to lead to a billion+$ exit. But if your goal is to become a billionaire and you want to be as stridently ethical as possible, I don't know how to help you (and would invite you to further examine your priorities).

It’s unclear to me that highly trained professionals are any better at this than a/b tests. Usually it’s the professionals themselves telling us that they’re better.

I guess it depends on where any individual places the task on the skill/luck or simple/complex scale. If the task (in this case, a design) is very simple — how many users who want to complete their voter registration form are able to — then experts may have an advantage.

OTOH, if it’s a complex space like facebooks news feed, I don’t think experts are the way to go. They simply think that they are.

FWIW, I’ve run hundreds of multivariate tests in my career. Every place I go, the design team is upset by the process, for the same reasons argued here. Every time, I challenge them to come up with 1 winning variation and 3 losers. If the designer-identified “winner” performs best, i pay them $10. If any of the losers wins, I get $10.

I have yet to meet a designer that can, a priori, pick the winning variation better than random chance would suggest.

Expertise is not valuable in an unpredictable context. Complex user facing systems like the news feed are impossible to predict.

I’m channeling Kahneman and Mauboussin here, but their theory explains my experience very well.

Trained experts in short term user tricking into more engagement would be marketers and advertisers. Not usability experts. Usability is not easily measurable with A/B tests, as those are usually not long term enough and not done well enough to make any conclusions.

Note that talking to customers is not easy too. To the point that you need to psychoanalyze all the feedback to understand why they make those comments. Useful feedback is very rare. Customers are just not usability experts, they don't really know what they are talking about.

Probably lots of things that require direct user feedback, like output from focus groups such as customer attitudes towards your product or customer impressions of utility and value.

Could you please elaborate on the degraded experience?

idk OP's position, but the lack of tactile feedback is probably the biggest flaw of touchscreen UIs. it's really nice to be able to give input to a device without actually looking at it.

it's a mild to moderate inconvenience on a phone, since you are looking at the screen most of the time you are using it and swype style keyboards remove most of the pain of typing on a virtual keyboard. it does make for a compromised music player, though, unless you can remap the hardware buttons to control media playback.

on the other hand, i find the touch UI trend in cars absolutely horrible. it's bad enough that you have to take your eyes off the road to read the center screen, but actually pressing a virtual button requires even more concentration to track where your finger is wrt the button and stabilize it against the motion of the vehicle.

I agree with you both. "turning on GPS" could just mean that while driving one has the view of the roads on to see which one's have traffic, not necessarily getting turn by turn directions to and from work every day.