Thursday, February 16, 2006
Its in there, last time we checked
Richard Danca discusses on CHI Consultants this piece that appeared on ZDNet last year:
"For years Jared Spool has been telling this story: When some software developers asked users what features they wanted in the next release, it turns out that all of the wanted features were already in the current version -- but no one knew. I always thought this was a clever but apocryphal story.
Now it turns out the story is frighteningly accurate!
Here's something from Ziff Davis about Microsoft's latest version of Office that shows the value of user testing (among other things!):
Thanks Richard. In product innovation, feature creep (and bloat) are relentless issues. Product managers are held accountable to new product sales, and adding or revising features becomes the easiest way to demonstrate tangible change, if not actual value. But features make an easy value proposition, even if they do not show up that way to the users. What would you propose to do if, as a successful product company, you needed to enhance a well-designed interactive product with a validated balance among its feature set, usability, and performance?
Microsoft "took over market share from all competitors back in the Word 6.0 phase of Office, not due to features (which WordPerfect had more of) but usability and performance. The feature set was leaner, but complete for 90% or more of all word processing tasks. But user interface improvements and "less crashing" led to it, and then Office, defeating every other productivity tool on the marketplace. Not the feature set per se, since every competitor (WordPerfect, Corel, FoxPro, Lotus 123) had more, or even stronger features. Not integration, although a consistent UI was nice. But within-product usability, accessible, findable features with easily-specified actions and parameters.
But from that point on, its been a fight against bloat, and all their innovations have been incremental and predictable. But when you have no competitors, why bother? (Well, Christensen has something to say about Innovation, and in my 2002 DMI paper, they allowed me to also say why I thought successful companies had trouble innovating. My takeaway: As organizations mature, their values change toward stabilizing values, and they lose the ability to "value" radical innovation. This also matches Christensen at his point that businesses ignore the small markets that true innovations aim toward, and have no patience to grow the emerging markets into the bigger ones that, eventually, will eat their lunch. (Patience in selling and radical differentiation are both values.)
Of course, there's a lot more to it than this. I'd love to hear some feedback, because the feature vs. usability conversation always imposes itself in our world.
"For years Jared Spool has been telling this story: When some software developers asked users what features they wanted in the next release, it turns out that all of the wanted features were already in the current version -- but no one knew. I always thought this was a clever but apocryphal story.
Now it turns out the story is frighteningly accurate!
Here's something from Ziff Davis about Microsoft's latest version of Office that shows the value of user testing (among other things!):
"For years, Microsoft has been trying to add features to Office without them getting in the way of people who already know their way around the software.
(The rest of the article, "Office 12 Makeover takes on Feature Creep" is at ZDNet.)
Unfortunately, the company was a little too successful at making its innovations unobtrusive. In user testing, Microsoft found that nine out of every 10 features that customers wanted to see added to Office were already in the program.
"They simply don't know it's there," Chris Capossela, a Microsoft vice president, told a developer crowd last week. "It's just too hard to find it."
Indeed, Office has become a case study for feature creep--the phenomenon in which a simple technology becomes complicated and unmanageable through the addition of new features. Office, which once had 100 commands neatly organized into menus, ballooned to contain some 1,500 commands located in scores of menus, toolbars and dialog boxes.
Thanks Richard. In product innovation, feature creep (and bloat) are relentless issues. Product managers are held accountable to new product sales, and adding or revising features becomes the easiest way to demonstrate tangible change, if not actual value. But features make an easy value proposition, even if they do not show up that way to the users. What would you propose to do if, as a successful product company, you needed to enhance a well-designed interactive product with a validated balance among its feature set, usability, and performance?
Microsoft "took over market share from all competitors back in the Word 6.0 phase of Office, not due to features (which WordPerfect had more of) but usability and performance. The feature set was leaner, but complete for 90% or more of all word processing tasks. But user interface improvements and "less crashing" led to it, and then Office, defeating every other productivity tool on the marketplace. Not the feature set per se, since every competitor (WordPerfect, Corel, FoxPro, Lotus 123) had more, or even stronger features. Not integration, although a consistent UI was nice. But within-product usability, accessible, findable features with easily-specified actions and parameters.
But from that point on, its been a fight against bloat, and all their innovations have been incremental and predictable. But when you have no competitors, why bother? (Well, Christensen has something to say about Innovation, and in my 2002 DMI paper, they allowed me to also say why I thought successful companies had trouble innovating. My takeaway: As organizations mature, their values change toward stabilizing values, and they lose the ability to "value" radical innovation. This also matches Christensen at his point that businesses ignore the small markets that true innovations aim toward, and have no patience to grow the emerging markets into the bigger ones that, eventually, will eat their lunch. (Patience in selling and radical differentiation are both values.)
Of course, there's a lot more to it than this. I'd love to hear some feedback, because the feature vs. usability conversation always imposes itself in our world.
