If you’ve ever implemented or designed a feature, this account of the process will likely resonate with you. What on the surface looks like a simple tweak easily snowballs into an avalanche of repercussions. My favorite quip comes in the end:
Applying the 80/20 rule means you will get feature requests from the 20.
If you’re not embarrassed – in the consumer internet – by the first version of the product you launched, you’ve launched too late.
In his latest post, Joshua Porter riffs on the concept of ‘every-day apps’, something I’ve talked about in the past (although I used ‘destination sites’ to describe such properties). In my post, I made some base assumptions suggesting that our capacity to visit sites on a regular basis is finite. It was nice to see Joshua cite a study reaffirming my guess, demonstrating that most people regularly visit only about 10 sites.
I found this description of product design particularly poignant, mostly because I’ve made this same mistake:
In general, most people think they’re building an everyday app, but they’re not. When the actual use patterns are discovered, most apps will be used every few days or less.
The rest of the article is spent postulating on how LinkedIn could bridge their ambitions to be an everyday site. For me, the more interesting problem is acknowledging that you’re not an everday app while still positioning the product to succeed.
AIR apps are like modern day Java applets… sure, they run on every platform. But they also suck on every platform
[via Marco]
if you are suggestive of listening to each and every feedback and source ideas for your product from the crowd-controlled opinion market, you’re pretty much in a cul-de-sac.
– thomas marban, indecisive