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Customer is actually doing as much work as experience in that beautifully apt & precise phrase. For developers, the idea of being able to build and sell a litt

Customer is actually doing as much work as experience in that beautifully apt & precise phrase. For developers, the idea of being able to build and sell a little specialized widget of functionality—the best spellchecker ever made—had obvious appeal. It might even provide a truly outstanding experience for users. But where would you find a customer excited about assembling their own word processor out of a dozen independently purchased components?

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
One of the best pieces of advice I have been given is “design for people who aren’t you”. Turns out, the vast majority of people want something that “just works” and involves no configuration or in-depth understanding. That’s not a bad thing, either.
toast0 5y ago
I mean spellcheck might actually make a lot of sense (if the hooks were appropriate). The interface is mostly set, but the word list and how you figure out if words in the document are correct have a lot of potential variation. Selling the product seems like a lot of work though. Maybe if you could add spell check in a language not included in the box, that would have at least a chance regionally. But things that are maybe even more potentially useful like math formula editors get really hairy if you want to share documents. Then people viewing the customer's documents might need a special viewer or a licensed copy of the editor if they want to adjust things. It's a big mess.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
in all fariness, B2B is a perfectly viable business model. If you don't or can't care about the UX, sell the hard work making the tech to some company that has those UX engineers to make that spell checker "just work". other companies are very happy to pay devs to put those components together (and serving a dev struggling with an API is likely easier than a user struggling with the UX).
duxup 5y ago
Yeah given user's goal with a doc is to ... communicate or otherwise do a thing. Working WITH the doc, picking components, or picking among a bunch of document editors, thinking about document technology is not their goal.

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago

One of the best pieces of advice I have been given is “design for people who aren’t you”. Turns out, the vast majority of people want something that “just works” and involves no configuration or in-depth understanding. That’s not a bad thing, either.

toast0 5y ago

I mean spellcheck might actually make a lot of sense (if the hooks were appropriate). The interface is mostly set, but the word list and how you figure out if words in the document are correct have a lot of potential variation. Selling the product seems like a lot of work though. Maybe if you could add spell check in a language not included in the box, that would have at least a chance regionally. But things that are maybe even more potentially useful like math formula editors get really hairy if you want to share documents. Then people viewing the customer's documents might need a special viewer or a licensed copy of the editor if they want to adjust things. It's a big mess.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

in all fariness, B2B is a perfectly viable business model. If you don't or can't care about the UX, sell the hard work making the tech to some company that has those UX engineers to make that spell checker "just work". other companies are very happy to pay devs to put those components together (and serving a dev struggling with an API is likely easier than a user struggling with the UX).

duxup 5y ago

Yeah given user's goal with a doc is to ... communicate or otherwise do a thing. Working WITH the doc, picking components, or picking among a bunch of document editors, thinking about document technology is not their goal.