I am lead developer and in regular debate with marketing about use of technical terms.
Currently users can search on string, date, and decimal. Users wanted to sum integer values in string so we said we need to add a datatype of integer. Currently the data loads come with integer data types - we just treated them as string. This also made for bad sorts - we should have supported integer all along.
All done and marketing does not want to use the term integer because users will not know what it means. We said what do you want us to call it and they said number. We said but they already have decimal and decimal is a number so how would they know the difference? I guess we could just call both (decimal and integer) number but we have some users that know the difference. Users will ask why they can put a . (decimal) in some numbers but not others.
Marketing also told us that users did not understand some of the advanced search options such (A and B) and not (C or D). We put an audit on search and only about 20% of the users were doing advanced searches but they are doing 80% of the searches. From the search pattern it is clear they are not flailing away and we are not getting support calls from this 20%.
Of the other 80% about 60% know what they want and just stay out of the complex stuff.
Yes we have the 20% that don't get it. But they are not going to get clarity by calling both integer and decimal a number?
I feel like we should focus on the most productive 20% not the least productive 20%.
How can I get across to marketing that our target group is smarter than marketing?
Technically engineering has marketing outranked. But I would like to get past this without pulling rank.
The formal definition of Integer is: The set of integers consists of zero (0), the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, ...) and their inverse (negatives, i.e. −1, −2, −3, ...).
That is all that is allowed in that search or edit field if regardless they understand it or not. If they enter an invalid character the box goes red and the entry is cancelled. If they hover to the right ? they get "x is invalid character for integer".