Control Feature Creep

Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 8:59 AM | Category: Business, Links, Meryl's Notes Blog, Tech No comments

Every new release of an application adds more features, but not always for the better. Get ten tips for getting feature frenzy under control. In writing an article about social network sites, I looked at over two dozen sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Sermo, TravBuddy, MyCreativeCommunity. Wikipedia provides a list of many social networking sites.

I noticed most specialty social network sites do one thing well — they provided the appropriate features that fit their site’s purpose and target market. They didn’t try to capture the features everyone else has.

The following is a shorthand version of Frank Spiller’s excellent post:

1. Get task-focused.

2. Map business requirements to user tasks.

3. Talk about user tasks not features.

4. Design for probability not possibility.

5. Validate features with user tasks.

6. Map features to tasks.

7. Create a feature-task matrix.

8. Think scenarios first, use cases next.

9. Use tasks to test features, and features to test tasks.

10. Use diary studies to evaluate feature adoption over time.

Remember that users won’t necessary use every feature in an application. It costs to add a feature — so make sure it’s worth the cost.

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Oops… Undoing the Last Action

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 8:50 AM | Category: Business, Meryl's Notes Blog, Tech No comments

I fill out too many surveys, but I like to help. Usually they ask opinions on a Web site, product, application, service and so on. I noticed an ugly pattern in that many don’t have a “Back” link. Sometimes surveys don’t like it when you use the Back button on the browser because of data processing.

Humans naturally pick an item from a list, but sometimes realize a different choice was the better one as the proceeded to the next question. So what to do? No back link or button. Some surveys mess up if you hit the Back button on the Web browser. If companies or whomever is collecting the data wants it right… then it needs to have a *back* link.

As I was writing this entry, I came across Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo, which talks about a similar issue.

I’ve been reviewing a lot of games and think about their usability in the back of my mind. One problem I see is that I accidentally click the screen while reading contain in a popup window or miss a message. I can’t get it back. Sometimes those messages or popups have important information, tips or help that I need. Either you have to start at the beginning or live without the information.

Maybe we need to make a new standard in all applications to “undo” the last action or “reopen” the last window.

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