At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few customization options), every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about.
Users only care about 20% of your application
101–110 of 199 posts
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
My state (Germany) recently switched away from Microsoft to open source solutions and public offices have week long delays due to employees not finding buttons they were used to. They expect a 1 to 1 copy of the Microsoft product. Training should be software independent. People need to be educated with computer basics, if they work in a field that requires the usage of computers. Having to go to some public office in…
The type of education in fundamentals that would allow users to flexibly switch between office productivity applications requires a fairly high level of abstract thinking. Not everyone has that cognitive ability. Some struggle with anything more complex than executing a set procedure and would require years of remedial education to break out of that mindset.
Maybe dont employ these people in positions that require a specific way of thinking then...
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#103But they don't necessarily care about the same 20%. Another thing worth considering is that your users won't actually know what features they are going to get until after they've used the application. Users will install your app not based on what's in the app but based on what they think is going to be in the app after they install it. That's an important distinction. All that hard work you are doing on features won'…
> But they don't necessarily care about the same 20%.
That’s kind of the article’s main point.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed some universal ones that are both necessary, and a total pain: - Teams & Fine-grained Permissions - Audit logging - SOC 2/3 compliance - Data wiping / retention / data policy management - Reporting - Cookie law crap (GDPR & CCPA) - Myriad forms of custom product tiers & billing arrangements I'd put these above several of the items on your list, and in my mind, they fit into the category of "things a develo…
It wasn't an exhaustive list, it was to articulate the difference between structural features, which all of those are, and product features, which are specific to your product.
Yeah, I don't really mean it as a criticism -- my list is stuff that I think is incredibly painful to build, ends up taking >80% of dev time, is messy/spidery, and which I've spent a lot of my life explaining the necessity of to (typically junior) engineers.
In short, this is the kind of stuff that I think fits the parent comment's categorization: it drives enterprise sales, engineers hate building it, and it never really ends because the maintenance and detailed feature requirements change with almost every contract.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The type of education in fundamentals that would allow users to flexibly switch between office productivity applications requires a fairly high level of abstract thinking. Not everyone has that cognitive ability. Some struggle with anything more complex than executing a set procedure and would require years of remedial education to break out of that mindset.
Maybe dont employ these people in positions that require a specific way of thinking then...
You're really missing the point. Most clerical jobs don't require that specific way of thinking. Major changes to office productivity applications are quite rare and it would be silly to hire for those jobs based on abstract cognitive abilities. Ability to reliably follow instructions is usually sufficient.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#106But they don't necessarily care about the same 20%. Another thing worth considering is that your users won't actually know what features they are going to get until after they've used the application. Users will install your app not based on what's in the app but based on what they think is going to be in the app after they install it. That's an important distinction. All that hard work you are doing on features won'…
> But they don't necessarily care about the same 20%.
Did you write that entire comment based on the headline only?
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#107Very true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enterprise has a different one. *like a toilet. It needs to be there. You use it 3 minutes per day. If it is not there, the house is uninhabitable.
As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.
This is what I've come to refer to as a Spice Girls sales team.
The solution is for the cost of these new additions to come off the top of the deal (pre-commission) they are signing to re-align the incentives.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you talking about structural fundamentals or product features? Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about: - SSO / SAML / auth integrations - ISO Certifications - Regular Pen tests - Localisation support - APIs ( that they'll never use ) - Bulk operations - Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting ) Get these and similar right and it's the d…
You missed some universal ones that are both necessary, and a total pain: - Teams & Fine-grained Permissions - Audit logging - SOC 2/3 compliance - Data wiping / retention / data policy management - Reporting - Cookie law crap (GDPR & CCPA) - Myriad forms of custom product tiers & billing arrangements I'd put these above several of the items on your list, and in my mind, they fit into the category of "things a develo…
yep, exactly. We implement some parts of that over the years and it's a hog.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise yo…
I worked at a place that did it a third way: The CEO had a product vision that changed every month.
Founder mode unlocked
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#110Yes, but many of them care about different twenty-percentses, so you probably still need the whole thing to keep the number of users you currently have.
BUT if you can find a feature that few people use, but which requires a lot of maintenance and/or ongoing development time, get rid of that bit and enjoy a higher ROI.