␡
- Remove
- How not to do it
- Focus on whats core
- Kill lame features
- What if the user...?
- But our customers want it
- Solutions, not processes
- When features dont matter
- Will it hurt?
- Prioritizing features
- Load
- Decisions
- Distractions
- Smart defaults
- Options and preferences
- When one option is too many
- Errors
- Visual clutter
- Removing words
- Simplifying sentences
- Removing too much
- You can do it
- Focus
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
But our customers want it
Jürgen Schweizer of Cultured Code warns against adding features simply because customers ask for them:
- We get a lot of feature requests, but what our customers don’t always realize is that if we went ahead and put an idea straight into the product, we’d probably break it. It would be too much or we’d have to move something important. So we try to resist adding new features.
- Instead, we try to reverse engineer the ideas—to figure out what problem the customer was having and to think about whether or not it’s something we should try to solve in our software.
Features often involve trade-offs that customers aren’t always aware of. Letting applications run in the background on your mobile phone sounds good—until you realize how quickly that can drain your battery and how annoying it can be to find out which apps are running and turn them off manually.
Adding features doesn’t always make the user’s experience simpler. Often it can lead to more frustration.
Sometimes you may be able to come up with an alternative solution that meets customers’ real needs (such as letting them switch between mobile applications quickly). But don’t be afraid to ignore requests to add more to your product.
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