5 July 2008 – 6:24 pm
The buzz started when 37signals wrote a brief post earlier this week stating that features were a one way street and once they are in place they can’t be removed on large, popular products.
After reading the post I saw it more as warning to research new features and avoid feature bloat.
While it’s impossible to always create a killer feature, research and testing can help point things in that direction (I blogged about this two years ago in Hitting the Sweet Spot (see pull-quotes below) and my sentiments are still the same).
While I agree that removing rarely used features can sometimes be painful it is by no means impossible or wrong to do so and my friend at Elapsed Time did a great job articulating this point (see post and pull-quotes below).
Feature Gene Pool
Product features should be viewed in a Darwinistic manner, where the ultimate goal for a feature should be to carve out a niché that is integrated within it’s environment and not counter to it.
And like genes, both “good” and “bad” features should attempt to grow and evolve by testing various tweaks to see what works and doesn’t.
However if the feature isn’t viable after multiple “generations” or is detrimental to it’s environment, it needs to either have its parts merged into another feature or get out of the feature gene pool all together.
“The lesson: Once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out.”
Besides the pull-quote below, he also calls out a great list on what strategies to take into account when reviewing features.
“I disagree – knowing what features to deprecate is one of the toughest challenges in prod/eng/UX mgmt but good leaders have to make these types of calls.”
“There is a lot to be said for kick ass new features and ideas but if those features aren’t well thought out, well executed and/or robust enough most users will think it’s cool then simply move on to the next site. However if there is a multitude of scattered features users will just get frustrated and leave.
Hitting that S-Spot often requires time, experimenting, and user feedback but once the features have reached the point where they are interactive, robust, and more importantly useful the users will keep coming back for more.”
Definitely check out the post it’s hilarious and steeped sarcasm. Here some quick pull-quotes:
“For starters, version 8 was a 22 MB download. Version 9 is a mere 33 MB — a whole major version up, and not even twice as big…”
“On my cable connection, it took about 5 minutes to download, nicely allowing me enough time to brew a decent cup of coffee while I waited…”
“I was impressed. It started in a minuscule 13 seconds, plus the time it took me to skim their poetic and beneficent license agreement.”
“Ah, the joy of using a new product. Unlike Microsoft products, Adobe’s new, bigger Reader behaves exactly the same as the old one. In fact, it’s so compatible I can’t even tell the difference! Boy, I know good release management when I see it…”
Posted in Design | No Comments »
