You're probably right, and I should have tempered my reaction.

What is bothersome about this study (and many like it) is, the study dismisses the universe of extenuating factors that can go into a design. It ignores how the execution of a design, logo, UI etc. can affect the readability and navigability of the page. It also glosses over the implications this has for mobile, which is a huge miss.

But most importantly you can't draw the conclusion "Centered Logos Hurt Website Navigation" from this study. You can maybe say "In Some Instances, on Some Platforms, Centered Logos May Hurt Website Navigation", but that's not as good a headline.

You should maybe read the comment I wrote about it.

Today in bullshit studies ...

Wow, what's with all the cynicism? There really wasn't anything too pandery or untrue said in that trailer

In our testing people have been split, but leaning towards yes, on whether or not there should be a personality. The bigger hurdle for people was wanting to know whether or not it was a bot. You say "if its a machine, it should act like one", but t's not that simple, people still have to learn how to have a conversation with a machine.

I get the rant, but all of these are solvable problems, esp. if (to use the admittedly non-optimal pizza example) someone had already ordered a number of times and the bot has access to all of that info. This is like the gripes about IoT, the examples aren't great, but that doesn't undermine the potential of the tech. I think it's kind of up to people who make human facing things to show how this can be used.

Also pizza ordering bots are the perfect first wave, of an eventual robot takeover.

That's exciting!

We did something very similar on a project about a month ago, it was productive, even in less than optimal conditions (primarily absentee stakeholders). What do you want to know?