![]() When we connect satisfaction to the product as a whole, superfluous capabilities are more clearly recognised as value destroying. But they don’t necessarily want the features that others asked for. ![]() Sure, people want the features they asked for. Put simply, people are satisfied when the get the product they need, not the feature(s) they asked for. But changing this requires application/product managers to shift their perspective of what constitutes user satisfaction. Over time, the long tail of under-utilised features gets longer and flatter.īut is this just the nature of software? Is it something we just have to accept? I don’t believe so. 11 (‘Change Font Size’).”Īs software products initially emerge, it’s reasonable to assume that most of the functionality is used by most customers. 400 command (‘Reset Picture’) is about the same in differencebetween No. 100 command (‘Accept Change’) and the No. The percentage difference in usage between the No. “Beyond the top 10 commands or so the curve flattens out considerably. The top five commands – Paste, Save, Copy, Undo, Bold – accounted for 32% of total command usage! Furthermore they found: Several years ago, Microsoft did an analysis of command use in Microsoft Word 2003. I find the people too often asking “how do I fix the UI” instead of asking “how did we break the UI.”īut the problem is persistent across the industry. There is a marked misunderstanding on the part of application/product managers that the blowback they’re getting on lousy UIs is most often the result of the unresolved prioritisation and presentation of ever-expanding feature sets. The operative question is how many people want Evernote to be all these things at once?Īnother problem that I find myself consistently highlighting to application/product managers is that perpetual functional expansion necessitates perpetuate UI remediation. In the case of Evernote, it’s become a personal productivity, group collaboration and enterprise information management tool. As O’Brien points out, expanding feature sets result in products that don’t have a core experience. After nearly three decades in the IT industry, the one truism I can rely on is that over-engineering software is a matter of when, not if. It’s just that O’Brien’s article highlights Evernote for what is really an industry-wide problem. I don’t mean to snipe at Libin or at Evernote. ![]() So, the benchmark should start at 50% and anything lower than that needs to trigger a career re-assignment for the product manager. If a piece of software doesn’t have a majority of its capabilities being used by most of its users, I think that’s a problem right there. That’s because most of the ingredients in burgers, fries and milkshakes are not what anyone would expect to find in a burger, a french fry or a milkshake.Īnother thing…how did we get to such a low standard? 5%? Really? In fairness, I’ve heard this same contorted logic from many other vendors patting themselves on the back for just-as-bad 20% functionality usage. The only other product that seems to get away with the same ratio of superfluousness as software is fast food. 95% of the features in Evernote create no value for any particular customer. If we look at this from the user’s perspective it strikes me that there’s a 95% problem. Not to take issue with O’Brien’s great article, but I would suggest that this only adds up to a 5% problem if we are looking at this from Evernote’s perspective. This is the heart of what O’Brien is referring to as the “5% problem.” ![]() We’ve got a few things we’re launching over the next few months to help with that.” And we need to be a lot better about tying it together. If everyone just found the same 5 percent, then we’d just cut the other 95 percent and save ourselves a lot of money. “And the problem is that it’s a different 5 percent for everyone. “What winds up happening at Evernote conferences is that people go and they say, ‘Oh, I love Evernote and I’ve been using it for years and now I realize I’ve only been using it for 5 percent of what it can do,’ ” Libin said. The article examines how Evernote ended up with a product that has too many features.īased on an interview with former Evernote CEO Phil Libin, he was quoted as saying: I just had a chance to read Chris O’Brien’s informative piece on VentureBeat titled “ Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |