

Ask HN: What's the difference between building features and a user experience? - smalter

It's often said that companies should focus on the user experience, not the features.  What exactly does that mean?<p>Features are built so that users can do more things which will presumably improve their experience.<p>It is just a matter of the coherence of the vision at a certain level of abstraction?  (Only care about feature insofar as it furthers a certain more abstract issue of the customer experience?)<p>Maybe I answered my own question.  I invite people to pontificate.  Thanks.
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notyourwork
They go hand in hand frankly. Also I feel they both deserve equal and adequate
attention. If you build something and it is missing features you are failing,
same as if you build something and it lacks a user experience you are failing.
However which is more noticeable? I would say it depends on the feature.

Ultimately, whether smart or dumb an end user will know if the user experience
is lacking. If a feature is missing though a user might or might not notice.
Depends on the feature.

Features are built to provide one part of the user experience, the UI itself
is what provides the overall user experience which is to an extent dictating
by the features required.

Make sense?

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brandonkm
One way of distinguishing between the two would be that user experience is the
cognitive interaction with features. If you start with a basic web app, then
add a user chat feature and then a group chat feature, ux would be how new and
existing users interact with those features and your entire application.

Put another way, user experience encompasses the design aspects and the
behavioral aspects of an app, as where features include the different
components that make up the overall user experience. Its the interaction with
the existing features that compose the ux.

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frossie
People complain about two things:

First, they complain about things that ought to work well but don't -

"I can never find that option"

"it crashes when I try to do this"

"it's counter-intuitive to need this"

"the defaults are not sensible"

"it takes too many button presses to do a common task"

Then they complain about things that they want to be able to do, but can't -

"it should support multiple timezones"

"I want to be able to sync across my devices"

"why can't I export it to another format"

"I want more privacy control"

The point is that no matter how much you work on the second list, if there is
notable stuff on the first list _your users will be unhappy regardless_

I am not convinced you can completely evaluate by yourself the importance of
list A against list B. I really recommend polling users in controlled and
well-thought out ways.

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zachallaun
Being that this discussion board is most frequented by those involved in
startups, I would posit the meaning behind "UX, not features" to actually be:
Focus on maximizing the experience of a small number of features over doing an
adequate job on a large number of features.

As Paul Buchheit stated, it's better to make a small number of users love you
than a large number of users kind of like you. To do this, maximize the
preferred, smaller feature set of that excited minority initially, and then
expand to encompass the majority only after you've captured that minority.

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hasenj
> It's often said that companies should focus on the user experience, not the
> features. What exactly does that mean?

It means focus on improving the user experience in the already existing
features, instead of just adding more and more features that don't fit
together.

Good user experience is somewhat invisible, and it seems rather simple when
you look at the results. Think of multi-touch on the iPhone.

Good user experience often requires cutting features out, which makes it hard
to get right if you're into the "let's add more features" mentality.

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symbiotic
Building a good user experience (in my opinion) involves: 1\. A research
period to determine which features your users need and 2\. A brainstorming
period to determine how to implement those features in a way that makes them
easy to learn over the short term, and easy/quick to use over the long term.

So to answer your question, user experience is more about the process of how
to build good features.

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wglb
Perhaps this isn't quite the right question. patio11 says
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774112>

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Ataraxy
Design for the novice, configure for the pro.

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andrewtbham
who says don't focus on features?

