

Ask HN : What to do with an underused feature - dan_sim

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.<p>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.<p>We believe in this feature a lot (at least, we're using it a lot). Any suggestion?
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nobody_nowhere
How 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.

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dan_sim
A 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).

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nobody_nowhere
I 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.

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shalmanese
If 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.

