Everyone Wants the World
The new 9rules Ali is only 5 days old and already a slew of feature requests have been coming our way. What have I learned during these five days that I already knew before, but never experienced myself? Everybody wants everything done their way. This isn’t a bad thing because we all know how to make the experience better for us, but most of the time one man’s solution becomes another man’s problem.
The tricky part we are finding about feature requests is that while all of them may sound good, not all of them are really practical or needed. For example, some people have requested that we integrate GMail into my.9rules and while the idea seems kind of cool there is really nothing practical about it. We are finding that with the infrastructure that we have put in place we can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean we should do all of those things.
Is it a bad thing that everyone wants the site to do everything? Of course not because that shows they have an interest in it instead of looking and turning away. The hope is that if you do implement a feature request it helps increase the experience of all the users in the system and not just the ones that requested it.
An even bigger problem is when the creators of the system want the system to do everything. We do get ahead of ourselves sometimes, but who doesn’t? As of now though we are focused on tightening up the user’s experience on the site and features can come down the road.
Related reading:
At FOWA in London last year, Joshua Schachter spoke about how everybody was asking for tag intersections as a feature, and how once implemented very few people actually used it.
His advice was to study hard about how people actually use the system, and then make it easier to do those things (I think that was it).
Thing is, with this it’s a different beast. Maybe what you need is to have a way for people to extend you app. Wouldn’t that be so you-know-two-ooh. Make it so that we can build the extensions and add ons we want. Possible?
By Mike Papageorge on February 12, 2007 9:36 am
I had noticed some bugs along the way. Some features may appear on profiles but not on others. Take for example, the flickr option. I have my username entered, but my photos do not appear but they appear on my friends pages.
By cristinamarie on February 12, 2007 12:15 pm
Papa G: Are you volunteering to code such functionality?
By Scrivs on February 12, 2007 2:29 pm
cristina, that’s not a bug at all! You have to set up your profile to show your Flickr photos… there’s an “edit” link when you are logged in.
By Montoya on February 12, 2007 4:06 pm
Papa G: Are you volunteering to code such functionality?
I wasn’t really, but we can discuss it. We’re slammed for work right now, but we can talk and see what it would take…
By Mike Papageorge on February 13, 2007 5:22 am