Yeah, this is what you get if you use metrics to find a "common ground of preference". But this is the primitive way of doing it. We already know the better way to do this, thanks to things like Howard Moskowitz's research and all the work done afterwards (http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce).
But nobody has successfully applied this to commercial UI/X design yet. Maybe because people are not sophisticated enough to appreciate choice when it comes to apps/websites. Or maybe because they are so overloaded that making them make any choice actually scares them away and drops the retention/click-through/interaction/etc. numbers. Then again, if would work, the company successfully using this would get a monopoly in their field instead of naturally sharing the user base with other competitors simply because the users don't all like the same things. I kind of like the idea of having 4 different tomato sauces made by 4 different producers, the "letting the market solve the problem" way, so I'm secretly glad the "better way of doing UX/I by numbers" hasn't been well applied in software :)
But nobody has successfully applied this to commercial UI/X design yet. Maybe because people are not sophisticated enough to appreciate choice when it comes to apps/websites. Or maybe because they are so overloaded that making them make any choice actually scares them away and drops the retention/click-through/interaction/etc. numbers. Then again, if would work, the company successfully using this would get a monopoly in their field instead of naturally sharing the user base with other competitors simply because the users don't all like the same things. I kind of like the idea of having 4 different tomato sauces made by 4 different producers, the "letting the market solve the problem" way, so I'm secretly glad the "better way of doing UX/I by numbers" hasn't been well applied in software :)