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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8647864" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Why would one not, as you have suggested below, define things such that these differences are categorized out? This seems a weakness of your overall proposal: either you have your categorization that excludes comparisons you don't want, but which seems to exclude other comparisons you do want, or you don't, and thus comparisons I'm making are appropriate.Turn that around: it is not about what the user is trying to accomplish, but what ends the designer is trying to support. Yes, end-users will bring whatever ends they wish to use the product for. The designer of something is, however, trying to make a product that will provide one or more ends for which users may desire said product. That's where focus vs diversity is a design consideration, and thus, something that factors into quality.I mean, you've already granted, as I understood it, that the product must be made for some kind of purpose. This is a question of intrinsic quality factors in terms of "did the creator actually have the effort and resources to fulfill all the purposes they set out to meet?"And I would argue that such categorization is you inserting arbitrary divisions that make comparison impossible. We could always object and demand finer and finer comparison until nothing could be compared because no other products could possibly match. "Oh well it has to be a burger fast food joint; you couldn't compare Taco Bell and McDonald's. But it also can't be focused on the dining experience, because McDonald's is clearly catering to the take-out crowd; you wouldn't compare it with Applebee's or Red Robin. Oh and don't forget that it needs to be specifically a very cheap fast-food takeout-focused burger joint, because McDonald's isn't trying to compete with something like Chili's or the like, that whole 'six-dollar burger' thing at Carl's Jr./Hardee's is definitely not the same," etc., etc. This ever-finer categorization results in the inverse of the apples-and-oranges problem; we start needing to compare Granny Smith apples from Washington state harvested in the early part of the season (e.g. October) but kept in good preservation conditions until early winter (e.g. Christmas), otherwise it's not a fair comparison.Suitability, as a category, is specifically what enables related but still cross-category comparisons in a useful way.</blockquote>

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