21–30 of 196 posts
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”
“Less is more”
“The value of a creative product doesn’t lie in how much is there, but in how much has been discarded.”
rttm: Reduce to the max
"Kill your darlings"
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> Visitors who didn't see the calculator were 16% more likely to sign up and 90% more likely to contact us than those who saw it. There was no increase in support tickets about pricing, which suggests users are overall less confused and happier.
Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money from your users, more of them will sign up. Whether they are better off depends on whether they end up getting a bill they are unhappy with later at some unspecified future date, or not. That's not something you will figure out from a short-term A/B test on the signup page. So this seems like totally useless evidence to me.
I see this dynamic frequently with A/B tests. For example, one of my coworkers implemented a change that removed information from search result snippets. They then ran an A/B test that showed that after removing the information, people clicked through to the search result page more often. Well, obviously, it makes sense that they might click through more often, if information they wanted which was previously in the snippet, now requires them to click through. The question of which is actually better seemed to have been totally forgotten.
> In an internal poll, 7 of every 10 people in the company thought the version with the calculator would do better. An interesting and pretty classic dynamic - I liked the article overall but I think this point didn't get the highlighting it deserved. If 30% of the people involved think that the calculator is a bad idea that signals a potentially huge problem even if the majority think it is fine. Be alert to the pol…
Even better if you have mixed incentives: sales wants any and all dark patterns enabled, customer support is sick of issuing refunds because the cart auto adds extended warranty to the purchase, etc
I smiled in the article when they claimed that removing the calculator might be better for users because more sales are completed. Ignoring that maybe the users were getting the appropriate amount of sticker shock, and bailing was the correct choice.
This is a beautifully designed blog interface. It’s one of the best I’ve seen, making it a pleasure to read.
> Except for one person, it never occurred to this very smart group of people that removing the source of confusion could be a good option. Reminds me of the quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." That applies to us as software engineers too, our salary depends on having projects to write code for so it's not so surprising that a very smart g…
Which may/not matter, but it requires more politics and negotiation to suddenly be dropped.
> Before long, a dedicated Slack channel was created, which accrued over 550+ messages representing opinions from every corner of the company. Another few thousand words and dozens of hours were spent in meetings discussing what we should add to the calculator to fix it. This is a symptom of over hiring. Too many people removes agency. When people lose sight of what's actually important and feel that they must reach…
Perhaps. It's also a symptom of bike shedding which can happen with as few as two people.
I suspect that this often exists because people have tried this, and been summarily burnt by either politics, or some form of Chestertons-Fence.
Which leads to the question of: how and when do we discern the difference? How do we design our teams and engineering to do things like,
- ensuring the psychological or political safety to suggest slimming down systems without having every other team come down on your head.
- incentivise “svelte” systems at a product level, without falling into Google-levels-of-“lmao this is going away now thanks bye”
- engineer for slimmer systems. There’s lots of ink spilled on the topic of making things extensible, or able to have stuff added to it, but seemingly little about the opposite. Is it the same engineering practices, or are there other concerns you’d need to take into account, if so, what are they?
- would you as a customer pay for something that was better at its purpose but didn’t have every single feature under the sun? I sure would, how many other people/orgs would, if given the option? I semi-controversially think that too many tools providing too much flexibility mostly encourages orgs to paint themselves into wacky processes, just because they can. I doubt this entirely goes away, but if given less feature/flexibility bloat, how much “fat” (process/overhead/friction/etc) could be trimmed out?
> Before long, a dedicated Slack channel was created, which accrued over 550+ messages representing opinions from every corner of the company. Another few thousand words and dozens of hours were spent in meetings discussing what we should add to the calculator to fix it. This is a symptom of over hiring. Too many people removes agency. When people lose sight of what's actually important and feel that they must reach…
> This is a symptom of over hiring. Perhaps. It's also a symptom of bike shedding which can happen with as few as two people.
I don't know if this calculator was good or bad, but the rationale sounds superficially ridiculous. > Visitors who didn't see the calculator were 16% more likely to sign up and 90% more likely to contact us than those who saw it. There was no increase in support tickets about pricing, which suggests users are overall less confused and happier. Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money…
How is that a function of the overly-simplified and often-wrong calculator?
If the user is never there to be happy/unhappy about it in the first place, then how would you test this anyway?
By closing the loop and increasing engagement, you are increasing the chance that you can make the customer happy and properly educated through future interactions.