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Ask HN : What to do with an underused feature
We created Timmy ( http://timmyontime.com ) more than 2 years ago and we recently reworked it a lot. There's a feature called "notes" that our own team uses a lot but a majority of our users don't use or understand it.
Notes can be used for many things. Example, we want to add a todo, we create a note like this : #todo @dan Use the new version of jQuery. We explain it in the app and in a post (see http://j.mp/vS7dK) but we don't see any difference in its use.
We believe in this feature a lot (at least, we're using it a lot). Any suggestion?
- nobody_nowhere 17y agoHow much is "a majority" of your users? You've got to figure out whether it's a power user feature that's not relevant to everyone, or something that people either don't need or don't understand.
- dan_sim 17y agoA majority of our users is in fact all of our users except us. We have less than 50 active users for the moment (it's still a beta).
- run4yourlives 17y agoYou pretty much have your answer then. It's a useless/not understood feature.
- nobody_nowhere 17y agoI don't have time to try out your app, so it's hard to give good advice here. But it seems like it should be a useful feature. To me, the explanation you provided was a bit hard to understand. Try refining it, and solicit direct feedback from some trusted users.
- shalmanese 17y agoIf your team finds it genuinely useful, it means you haven't conveyed the mental model correctly to your users. Have you tried sitting strangers in front of the software and seeing how they use it? Iterate on the interaction design until you find that it clicks in face to face testing.