7 ms·

A product is not just about features. It's about experience.

54 points by ssclafani 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
joe_the_user 16y ago
Some products are about features and some are about experience. Experience seems like it wins if your audience is a large number of casual users. Having the right Features seem more important if you're after a smaller number of professionals who have specific things that they need to do (why Adobe prevails in certain field despite their horrific UIs).
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Adobe managed to get lock-in, nothing more. There's no loyalty there. I loved PS3, I loved PS7. I loathe CS1-5. I'm trapped there, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI in Photoshop, I'm gone. An app called Opacity is really close – in many ways it's better than Photoshop, chiefly because they care about how I'll use it. Once they iron out some performance issues with vector objects, I'm there.
  - oneplusone 16y ago
    I don't know. I love Photoshop. My personal opinion here, but I think it is an incredibly well designed piece of software. Maybe not the Mac version, but the PC version is just well thought out. I just don't see anything that could possibly make me want to switch.
    - danilocampos 16y ago
      It's little things. Workflow: Opacity lets me define factories to quickly generate images as I iterate a design. They're like a combo of slices and save for web in PS. Using factories is infinitely faster than cumbersome layer comps, slice selections and export scripts. Making things polished: Opacity lets me easily snap to whole pixels, instead of sub-pixel horseshit that makes everything look blurry. Using the pen tool in Opacity gives me smart, dynamic guides to help me align my anchor points. "Layer styles:" Instead of confining me to one of every kind of layer style and forcing me into a specific compositing order for each, Opacity lets me do whatever I need to, in whatever order, as often as I want. It's liberating and time saving, especially when you're making UI elements. The fact that it doesn't take a long time to launch is also nice. Photoshop is bloaty and cluttered. There's no focus there and I'm pretty sure no one at Adobe is really giving any thought to how I will use their software. They're working up feature lists, and not much more than that. (For those interested, here's Opacity, too: http://likethought.com/opacity/ http://likethought.com/opacity/)
    - joe_the_user 16y ago
      Why? What, in particular, is well designed about Photoshop? What alternatives have you looked at? My memory of it is that the features were haphazardly organized, all of operations required messing with horrible little mousy controls and it was obscure how to do anything beside spray paint on the image.
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI in Photoshop, I'm gone. You mean when someone comes along with an application with the required features, perhaps? (see above) As a pure amateur, I have found Corel Potopaint and Corel Draw infinitely more pleasant than anything Adobe does. But I also hear that they don't have the really specific features professionals need ("trapping" and other stuff I don't have a clue about).
    - danilocampos 16y ago
      That's just the thing, Photoshop actually has fewer features that matter to me than my favored image editor, Opacity. Tellingly, though, those features are centered around making the user experience easy and frictionless. (I went on and on about Opacity in another thread, it was quite a love story.) As soon as Opacity's vector performance is on par with Photoshop, I'm out!
danilocampos 16y ago
Making users happy should be core to any business. Netflix and Zappos rose to incredible success on the strength of giving people more than just features – they gave care. In doing that they crushed other companies who gave the bare minimum. Apple's brand has grown in the same way. Anywhere you find companies indifferent to the user experience, you'll find a huge pot of opportunity. When you earn love and loyalty through truly virtuous exchanges, people will help you with your cause. It's true with business, it's true with your personal life. Being good to people, through your features, through your behavior, through your values, has to, has to, has to come first, no matter what you're working on or how big you are.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Making users happy should be core to any business. Maybe it should be but plenty businesses make plenty of money without doing that. Look at cable companies or large health insurance companies. Yes, in markets where you have many competitors, making customers happy is important. When you have fewer competitors or when you are selling a commodity, cutting costs and increasing your output is the key. When you have a pure monopoly, continued payments to the senator of your choice are in order.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Yeah, but the cable companies are screwed. At the very moment I can drop cable, I will. As soon as I find decent bandwidth provided by someone who isn't Comcast, they don't get my money anymore and I will piss on their graves. They're the next Blockbuster. I already won't pay for cable television. I want to give Netflix my money. As much of it as they're willing to trade for great value. I like doing business with them. You can make money by not making people happy, sure. But you can also make dinner without caring how it tastes. It'll satisfy some baseline nutritional needs, but what is the point? edit: And don't get me started on health insurance companies. They exist in a nauseating little ecological niche carved out through a perversion of the tax code. The moment health insurance stops being equated with compensation, they dry up like weeds, replaced by companies who must be genuinely accountable to the market. I get what you're saying, but I'd rather rob people at gunpoint than make money like these guys. At least the robber has the courtesy to screw you in person, you know?
adityakothadiya 16y ago
Definitely user experience is the new IP. Some startups are getting some advantage over competitors just based on user experience. But do you think user experience is really defensible? How hard it is for competitors to imitate your user experience? (Apple just didn't have user experience. They had multi-touch technology as well, which was defensible.) I remember reading one post from Union Square Venture blog about defensibility is not about features, or technology layer you use - but now a days its about the network effect (Craigslist, eBay), and accumulation of data asset (Google, Facebook). So how startups can win over competitors in long run just based on User Experience? Sure, it can give great head start, but I think to sustain that leadership in the long run, you need to also innovate defensible technology or above mentioned network effect or data asset.
- ugh 16y ago
  Dropbox has many competitors but none seem to be able to or even want to copy the very smooth experience of using Dropbox. I tried many competitors and found none that comes close. I don’t know why that is but it seems to me that really copying an experience is not at all easy. (I also think that multi-touch is a neat feature of the iPhone but in no way essential to the experience. Pinching makes for a nice tech demo but on the small screen the ordinary and somewhat clever double-tap works much better. You can theoretically build a great iPhone clone without any multi-touch.)
  - Periodic 16y ago
    There's a lot of user experience that takes a lot of coding to get right. Sites, apps and devices with good user experience didn't just get it magically, they worked at it. Copying it would also take work. It's similar to startups. Ideas are cheap and easy, but executing them well (profitably) is hard.
endtime 16y ago
>There you go. You don't get it. Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be. Perhaps beside the point, but...I can't be the only one who things that Windows 7 is a vastly better experience than OS X.
- a4agarwal 16y ago
  Maybe Windows 7 is better than OS X. But to get there, I'm sure the Windows team used OS X extensively to see what it does well, what it does poorly. Someone who hasn't even tried the best has no way to build something better.
- maguay 16y ago
  Actually most XP users would still fit this description. Windows 7 is great, but so many people that won't upgrade from XP try to argue that it has the same features, performance, etc., and don't get what makes 7 better. But you could argue this over many different levels. Hey, some would say that the BMW driver doesn't really know how great it could be until they drive a Rolls Royce or, perhaps, own a private aircraft, etc. Some of it still is perception...
SilianRail 16y ago
"User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board." - Evan Williams CEO of Twitter http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp
madh 16y ago
Does anyone know who said "It's about experience" first? I keep hearing this great principle rehashed over and over.
holychiz 16y ago
Sachin is right. A product is more than a feature list. He may come across as arrogant for pointing to Apple et al. as example of great product but his point really is about experiencing a great product and to duplicate this feeling/experience to his product. For example, the unwrapping experience of an iPod does not show up on a feature list but damm, it feels good to open that box because Apple took the effort to make it seem like you're open a present. He should've point to Google Search as another example of great experience. I remembered my virgin search with Google. Relative to other search engine at the time, Google was insanely fast and relevant. Do you remember? if not Google, there must be some products that you fell in love with, now ask yourself if it was the feature list or the experience that you love. btw, having the right feature set at the right moment is part of experience. Sachin got nothing to apologize for, Posterous is one of the great product out there. It just works! Go, Posterous!
brlewis 16y ago
Sachin makes an important point about what makes people love a product and stay with it. An important counterpoint, though, is that feature lists sell: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html My experience validated Don Norman's. After I read his essay, I removed the carefully crafted sentences on http://ourdoings.com/ http://ourdoings.com/ describing the experience, and replaced them with ugly sentence fragments cramming as many features as would fit the layout. My KPI for new users spiked. YMMV.
mattmaroon 16y ago
I love people who believe themselves arbiters of taste. You use Windows, therefore you don't know what style is. You don't drive a BMW, therefore your opinion about software is uninformed. And German cars suck. What they don't understand, and why Lexus vastly outsells them, is that the car breaking down every 20k miles is a significant blemish on their user experience. The inattention to detail could be overlooked, even the little GPS knob, which is the worst user interface ever designed, if they could just make it onto an IQS list once.
- a4agarwal 16y ago
  The exact quote was, "Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be" I never said that you can't use Windows, an Android, or drive another car. But at some point you need to use the top end product to really appreciate what's out there. If you spend your whole life on Windows/BlackBerry/Toyota, you might not understand what a great product is. Before the iPhone came out, no one knew how great a phone could be. Even I didn't. The iPhone made me understand how you can take an existing feature set, and dramatically change a product through the experience. You're going with a blanket, "German cars suck"? Really? I'd bet German cars have more fanatics than Japanese cars do. German cars delight people. Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car. To me, a Lexus is just a high end Honda. It gets me from point A to point B, with a bit more luxury. One of Lexus's problems is that they don't have a vision, a passion. They just pump out what people will buy: http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-while-they-created http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-while-... And yes, BMW sucks at interface design. Where they excel is in building the ultimate driving machine. I'm all for BMW outsourcing their tech: http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-for-bmw-thats-bui http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-for-...
  - donaq 16y ago
    Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car While the definition of "better" varies from person to person, They just pump out what people will buy the definition of a successful business is rather less subjective. Pumping out what people will buy is pretty much what makes a business successful. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about the success of a product? Isn't a successful product the one with the most users?
derefr 16y ago
To put this in more actionable vocabulary: don't count features you've built, count user stories you've satisfied. Frequently the same small subset of your features make up the key steps in almost all your stories, while the rest of your features can't really find a business use-case at all (because the user will be more likely to chain together other, more familiar features, or chain your feature with features from other products, to accomplish the task instead.)
maguay 16y ago
Only problem is, when it comes to blogging, I thought Tumblr was the one focused totally on experience and ease of use. Posterous still feels more like it's trying to give you every feature available and then some...

54 points by ssclafani 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Some products are about features and some are about experience. Experience seems like it wins if your audience is a large number of casual users. Having the right Features seem more important if you're after a smaller number of professionals who have specific things that they need to do (why Adobe prevails in certain field despite their horrific UIs).

danilocampos 16y ago
Adobe managed to get lock-in, nothing more. There's no loyalty there. I loved PS3, I loved PS7. I loathe CS1-5. I'm trapped there, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI in Photoshop, I'm gone. An app called Opacity is really close – in many ways it's better than Photoshop, chiefly because they care about how I'll use it. Once they iron out some performance issues with vector objects, I'm there.
- oneplusone 16y ago
  I don't know. I love Photoshop. My personal opinion here, but I think it is an incredibly well designed piece of software. Maybe not the Mac version, but the PC version is just well thought out. I just don't see anything that could possibly make me want to switch.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    It's little things. Workflow: Opacity lets me define factories to quickly generate images as I iterate a design. They're like a combo of slices and save for web in PS. Using factories is infinitely faster than cumbersome layer comps, slice selections and export scripts. Making things polished: Opacity lets me easily snap to whole pixels, instead of sub-pixel horseshit that makes everything look blurry. Using the pen tool in Opacity gives me smart, dynamic guides to help me align my anchor points. "Layer styles:" Instead of confining me to one of every kind of layer style and forcing me into a specific compositing order for each, Opacity lets me do whatever I need to, in whatever order, as often as I want. It's liberating and time saving, especially when you're making UI elements. The fact that it doesn't take a long time to launch is also nice. Photoshop is bloaty and cluttered. There's no focus there and I'm pretty sure no one at Adobe is really giving any thought to how I will use their software. They're working up feature lists, and not much more than that. (For those interested, here's Opacity, too: http://likethought.com/opacity/ http://likethought.com/opacity/)
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    Why? What, in particular, is well designed about Photoshop? What alternatives have you looked at? My memory of it is that the features were haphazardly organized, all of operations required messing with horrible little mousy controls and it was obscure how to do anything beside spray paint on the image.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI in Photoshop, I'm gone. You mean when someone comes along with an application with the required features, perhaps? (see above) As a pure amateur, I have found Corel Potopaint and Corel Draw infinitely more pleasant than anything Adobe does. But I also hear that they don't have the really specific features professionals need ("trapping" and other stuff I don't have a clue about).
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    That's just the thing, Photoshop actually has fewer features that matter to me than my favored image editor, Opacity. Tellingly, though, those features are centered around making the user experience easy and frictionless. (I went on and on about Opacity in another thread, it was quite a love story.) As soon as Opacity's vector performance is on par with Photoshop, I'm out!

danilocampos 16y ago

Making users happy should be core to any business. Netflix and Zappos rose to incredible success on the strength of giving people more than just features – they gave care. In doing that they crushed other companies who gave the bare minimum. Apple's brand has grown in the same way. Anywhere you find companies indifferent to the user experience, you'll find a huge pot of opportunity. When you earn love and loyalty through truly virtuous exchanges, people will help you with your cause. It's true with business, it's true with your personal life. Being good to people, through your features, through your behavior, through your values, has to, has to, has to come first, no matter what you're working on or how big you are.

joe_the_user 16y ago
Making users happy should be core to any business. Maybe it should be but plenty businesses make plenty of money without doing that. Look at cable companies or large health insurance companies. Yes, in markets where you have many competitors, making customers happy is important. When you have fewer competitors or when you are selling a commodity, cutting costs and increasing your output is the key. When you have a pure monopoly, continued payments to the senator of your choice are in order.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Yeah, but the cable companies are screwed. At the very moment I can drop cable, I will. As soon as I find decent bandwidth provided by someone who isn't Comcast, they don't get my money anymore and I will piss on their graves. They're the next Blockbuster. I already won't pay for cable television. I want to give Netflix my money. As much of it as they're willing to trade for great value. I like doing business with them. You can make money by not making people happy, sure. But you can also make dinner without caring how it tastes. It'll satisfy some baseline nutritional needs, but what is the point? edit: And don't get me started on health insurance companies. They exist in a nauseating little ecological niche carved out through a perversion of the tax code. The moment health insurance stops being equated with compensation, they dry up like weeds, replaced by companies who must be genuinely accountable to the market. I get what you're saying, but I'd rather rob people at gunpoint than make money like these guys. At least the robber has the courtesy to screw you in person, you know?

adityakothadiya 16y ago

Definitely user experience is the new IP. Some startups are getting some advantage over competitors just based on user experience. But do you think user experience is really defensible? How hard it is for competitors to imitate your user experience? (Apple just didn't have user experience. They had multi-touch technology as well, which was defensible.) I remember reading one post from Union Square Venture blog about defensibility is not about features, or technology layer you use - but now a days its about the network effect (Craigslist, eBay), and accumulation of data asset (Google, Facebook). So how startups can win over competitors in long run just based on User Experience? Sure, it can give great head start, but I think to sustain that leadership in the long run, you need to also innovate defensible technology or above mentioned network effect or data asset.

ugh 16y ago
Dropbox has many competitors but none seem to be able to or even want to copy the very smooth experience of using Dropbox. I tried many competitors and found none that comes close. I don’t know why that is but it seems to me that really copying an experience is not at all easy. (I also think that multi-touch is a neat feature of the iPhone but in no way essential to the experience. Pinching makes for a nice tech demo but on the small screen the ordinary and somewhat clever double-tap works much better. You can theoretically build a great iPhone clone without any multi-touch.)
- Periodic 16y ago
  There's a lot of user experience that takes a lot of coding to get right. Sites, apps and devices with good user experience didn't just get it magically, they worked at it. Copying it would also take work. It's similar to startups. Ideas are cheap and easy, but executing them well (profitably) is hard.

endtime 16y ago

>There you go. You don't get it. Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be. Perhaps beside the point, but...I can't be the only one who things that Windows 7 is a vastly better experience than OS X.

a4agarwal 16y ago
Maybe Windows 7 is better than OS X. But to get there, I'm sure the Windows team used OS X extensively to see what it does well, what it does poorly. Someone who hasn't even tried the best has no way to build something better.
maguay 16y ago
Actually most XP users would still fit this description. Windows 7 is great, but so many people that won't upgrade from XP try to argue that it has the same features, performance, etc., and don't get what makes 7 better. But you could argue this over many different levels. Hey, some would say that the BMW driver doesn't really know how great it could be until they drive a Rolls Royce or, perhaps, own a private aircraft, etc. Some of it still is perception...

SilianRail 16y ago

"User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board." - Evan Williams CEO of Twitter http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

madh 16y ago

Does anyone know who said "It's about experience" first? I keep hearing this great principle rehashed over and over.

holychiz 16y ago

Sachin is right. A product is more than a feature list. He may come across as arrogant for pointing to Apple et al. as example of great product but his point really is about experiencing a great product and to duplicate this feeling/experience to his product. For example, the unwrapping experience of an iPod does not show up on a feature list but damm, it feels good to open that box because Apple took the effort to make it seem like you're open a present. He should've point to Google Search as another example of great experience. I remembered my virgin search with Google. Relative to other search engine at the time, Google was insanely fast and relevant. Do you remember? if not Google, there must be some products that you fell in love with, now ask yourself if it was the feature list or the experience that you love. btw, having the right feature set at the right moment is part of experience. Sachin got nothing to apologize for, Posterous is one of the great product out there. It just works! Go, Posterous!

brlewis 16y ago

Sachin makes an important point about what makes people love a product and stay with it. An important counterpoint, though, is that feature lists sell: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html My experience validated Don Norman's. After I read his essay, I removed the carefully crafted sentences on http://ourdoings.com/ http://ourdoings.com/ describing the experience, and replaced them with ugly sentence fragments cramming as many features as would fit the layout. My KPI for new users spiked. YMMV.

mattmaroon 16y ago

I love people who believe themselves arbiters of taste. You use Windows, therefore you don't know what style is. You don't drive a BMW, therefore your opinion about software is uninformed. And German cars suck. What they don't understand, and why Lexus vastly outsells them, is that the car breaking down every 20k miles is a significant blemish on their user experience. The inattention to detail could be overlooked, even the little GPS knob, which is the worst user interface ever designed, if they could just make it onto an IQS list once.

a4agarwal 16y ago
The exact quote was, "Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be" I never said that you can't use Windows, an Android, or drive another car. But at some point you need to use the top end product to really appreciate what's out there. If you spend your whole life on Windows/BlackBerry/Toyota, you might not understand what a great product is. Before the iPhone came out, no one knew how great a phone could be. Even I didn't. The iPhone made me understand how you can take an existing feature set, and dramatically change a product through the experience. You're going with a blanket, "German cars suck"? Really? I'd bet German cars have more fanatics than Japanese cars do. German cars delight people. Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car. To me, a Lexus is just a high end Honda. It gets me from point A to point B, with a bit more luxury. One of Lexus's problems is that they don't have a vision, a passion. They just pump out what people will buy: http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-while-they-created http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-while-... And yes, BMW sucks at interface design. Where they excel is in building the ultimate driving machine. I'm all for BMW outsourcing their tech: http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-for-bmw-thats-bui http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-for-...
- donaq 16y ago
  Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car While the definition of "better" varies from person to person, They just pump out what people will buy the definition of a successful business is rather less subjective. Pumping out what people will buy is pretty much what makes a business successful. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about the success of a product? Isn't a successful product the one with the most users?

derefr 16y ago

To put this in more actionable vocabulary: don't count features you've built, count user stories you've satisfied. Frequently the same small subset of your features make up the key steps in almost all your stories, while the rest of your features can't really find a business use-case at all (because the user will be more likely to chain together other, more familiar features, or chain your feature with features from other products, to accomplish the task instead.)

maguay 16y ago

Only problem is, when it comes to blogging, I thought Tumblr was the one focused totally on experience and ease of use. Posterous still feels more like it's trying to give you every feature available and then some...