

It’s Not What Your Software Does, It’s What People Do With Your Software - gdevore
http://www.bluemangolearning.com/blog/2011/04/its-not-what-your-software-does-its-what-people-do-with-your-software/

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dmlorenzetti
_The features don’t matter. It’s all about the outcomes. What can people do
with your software?_

I've seen software with the opposite problem-- simulation tools applied to
problems outside the range they were designed to handle. For example, a tool
that idealizes gases in a room as well-mixed, used to analyze smoke movement
during a fire. Or a program that assumes ducts have no air leaks, used to
estimate energy losses in a duct system. In cases like these, the results
aren't total garbage, but they do have to be interpreted very carefully.

For some software, a feature list isn't just "what the software does." It's
also a list of warnings about where the results should be taken with a grain
of salt.

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modernerd
"The creators of Garageband for iPad didn’t care about what their software
could do. They cared about what people could do with their software."

Aren't they the same thing? Feature lists describe what your software can do,
which shapes what people can do with your software.

That GarageBand for iPad is accessible to all might be more to do with the
platform than the featureset.

~~~
parfe
How to remove Red-eye in photoshop:
<http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/photoshop/ht/apsredeye.htm>

How to remove Red-eye in Picasa
<http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/picasa/ht/redeye.htm>

Both pieces of software can remove redeye. For Picasa the instructions boil
down to "Click the Fix Red-eye button" whereas Photoshop involves layers,
Gaussian blur, saturation, eye droppers.

Which would you say is more accessible for someone maintaining a photo album?
Photoshop has more features, but Picasa is more useful to me (in a certain
context, obviously.)

~~~
Flemlord
Those Photoshop instructions are for older versions of Photoshop. In later
versions, there is a "remove redeye" tool that seems to be much easier to use
than Picasa's:

[http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b...](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-7601a.html)

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jimsteinhart
It’s not what people do. It's what your software does to people.

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rexreed
To paraphrase a philosophical statement: "If a Software Feature falls in a
forest, and no one is around to use it, is it a Feature?"

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ipfree
RockBand is an example of successful application with minimal features. There
are many failures that you newer hear about because they lock feature.

