
A product is not just about features. It's about experience. - ssclafani
http://sachin.posterous.com/you-cant-measure-a-product-in-features-you-ca
======
danilocampos
Making users happy should be core to any business. Netflix and Zappos rose to
incredible success on the strength of giving people more than just features –
they gave care. In doing that they crushed other companies who gave the bare
minimum. Apple's brand has grown in the same way.

Anywhere you find companies indifferent to the user experience, you'll find a
huge pot of opportunity. When you earn love and loyalty through truly virtuous
exchanges, people will help you with your cause. It's true with business, it's
true with your personal life.

Being good to people, through your features, through your behavior, through
your values, has to, has to, has to come first, no matter what you're working
on or how big you are.

~~~
joe_the_user
_Making users happy should be core to any business._

Maybe it should be but plenty businesses make plenty of money without doing
that. Look at cable companies or large health insurance companies.

Yes, in markets where you have many competitors, making customers happy is
important. When you have fewer competitors or when you are selling a
commodity, cutting costs and increasing your output is the key. When you have
a pure monopoly, continued payments to the senator of your choice are in
order.

~~~
danilocampos
Yeah, but the cable companies are screwed. At the very moment I can drop
cable, I will. As soon as I find decent bandwidth provided by someone who
isn't Comcast, they don't get my money anymore and _I will piss on their
graves._ They're the next Blockbuster. I already won't pay for cable
television.

I want to give Netflix my money. As much of it as they're willing to trade for
great value. I like doing business with them. You can make money by not making
people happy, sure. But you can also make dinner without caring how it tastes.
It'll satisfy some baseline nutritional needs, but what is the point?

edit: And don't get me started on health insurance companies. They exist in a
nauseating little ecological niche carved out through a perversion of the tax
code. The moment health insurance stops being equated with compensation, they
dry up like weeds, replaced by companies who must be genuinely accountable to
the market.

I get what you're saying, but I'd rather rob people at gunpoint than make
money like these guys. At least the robber has the courtesy to screw you in
person, you know?

~~~
joe_the_user
_At the very moment I can drop cable, I will._

Ah, but you can't... Having a monopoly position put these fellows in the
position where they make money from customer who leave them for anyone ... _if
they could_. In fact, they make the most money that way ... and the fiduciary
duty they have ... to share holders, says they have to do that, doesn't it?

~~~
danilocampos
For the moment. But the wheel turns. It _always_ does. And that's the
important thing.

For a very long time, media distribution revolved around warehousing
cumbersome black boxes of plastic and charging absurd fees for access. The
barriers for entry were extraordinary, requiring geographic reach and
licensing agreements. Nationwide media rental was a defacto monopoly for
Blockbuster.

Then the medium of information shifted. Because Blockbuster didn't care that
much about whether or not people were happy with the service they provided,
they didn't notice the new opportunities to make their business better.

Someone else did. Someone always will.

Netflix, because they are customer focused, is busy making itself obsolete.
They know one day that the wheel will turn. Physical media will disappear
entirely.

The same will happen for bandwidth. Disruption is only a matter of time. As
always, there are challenges. But the demand is universal. The market is
enormous.

 _And everyone fucking hates the incumbents._

------
joe_the_user
Some products are about features and some are about experience.

Experience seems like it wins if your audience is a large number of casual
users. Having the right Features seem more important if you're after a smaller
number of professionals who have specific things that they need to do (why
Adobe prevails in certain field despite their horrific UIs).

~~~
danilocampos
Adobe managed to get lock-in, nothing more. There's no loyalty there. I loved
PS3, I loved PS7. I loathe CS1-5. I'm trapped there, and I know I'm not alone
in that sentiment.

As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI
in Photoshop, I'm gone. An app called Opacity is really close – in many ways
it's better than Photoshop, chiefly because they care about how I'll use it.
Once they iron out some performance issues with vector objects, I'm there.

~~~
oneplusone
I don't know. I love Photoshop. My personal opinion here, but I think it is an
incredibly well designed piece of software. Maybe not the Mac version, but the
PC version is just well thought out. I just don't see anything that could
possibly make me want to switch.

~~~
danilocampos
It's little things.

Workflow: Opacity lets me define factories to quickly generate images as I
iterate a design. They're like a combo of slices and save for web in PS. Using
factories is infinitely faster than cumbersome layer comps, slice selections
and export scripts.

Making things polished: Opacity lets me easily snap to whole pixels, instead
of sub-pixel horseshit that makes everything look blurry. Using the pen tool
in Opacity gives me smart, dynamic guides to help me align my anchor points.

"Layer styles:" Instead of confining me to one of every kind of layer style
and forcing me into a specific compositing order for each, Opacity lets me do
whatever I need to, in whatever order, as often as I want. It's liberating and
time saving, especially when you're making UI elements.

The fact that it doesn't take a long time to launch is also nice.

Photoshop is bloaty and cluttered. There's no focus there and I'm pretty sure
no one at Adobe is really giving any thought to how _I_ will use their
software. They're working up feature lists, and not much more than that.

(For those interested, here's Opacity, too: <http://likethought.com/opacity/>)

------
brlewis
Sachin makes an important point about what makes people love a product and
stay with it.

An important counterpoint, though, is that feature lists sell:
<http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html>

My experience validated Don Norman's. After I read his essay, I removed the
carefully crafted sentences on <http://ourdoings.com/> describing the
experience, and replaced them with ugly sentence fragments cramming as many
features as would fit the layout. My KPI for new users spiked. YMMV.

------
SilianRail
"User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued
and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire
people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole
company on board." - Evan Williams CEO of Twitter

<http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp>

------
holychiz
Sachin is right. A product is more than a feature list. He may come across as
arrogant for pointing to Apple et al. as example of great product but his
point really is about experiencing a great product and to duplicate this
feeling/experience to his product. For example, the unwrapping experience of
an iPod does not show up on a feature list but damm, it feels good to open
that box because Apple took the effort to make it seem like you're open a
present. He should've point to Google Search as another example of great
experience. I remembered my virgin search with Google. Relative to other
search engine at the time, Google was insanely fast and relevant. Do you
remember? if not Google, there must be some products that you fell in love
with, now ask yourself if it was the feature list or the experience that you
love. btw, having the right feature set at the right moment is part of
experience.

Sachin got nothing to apologize for, Posterous is one of the great product out
there. It just works! Go, Posterous!

------
adityakothadiya
Definitely user experience is the new IP. Some startups are getting some
advantage over competitors just based on user experience. But do you think
user experience is really defensible? How hard it is for competitors to
imitate your user experience? (Apple just didn't have user experience. They
had multi-touch technology as well, which was defensible.)

I remember reading one post from Union Square Venture blog about defensibility
is not about features, or technology layer you use - but now a days its about
the network effect (Craigslist, eBay), and accumulation of data asset (Google,
Facebook).

So how startups can win over competitors in long run just based on User
Experience? Sure, it can give great head start, but I think to sustain that
leadership in the long run, you need to also innovate defensible technology or
above mentioned network effect or data asset.

~~~
ugh
Dropbox has many competitors but none seem to be able to or even want to copy
the very smooth experience of using Dropbox. I tried many competitors and
found none that comes close.

I don’t know why that is but it seems to me that really copying an experience
is not at all easy.

(I also think that multi-touch is a neat feature of the iPhone but in no way
essential to the experience. Pinching makes for a nice tech demo but on the
small screen the ordinary and somewhat clever double-tap works much better.
You can theoretically build a great iPhone clone without any multi-touch.)

~~~
Periodic
There's a lot of user experience that takes a lot of coding to get right.
Sites, apps and devices with good user experience didn't just get it
magically, they worked at it. Copying it would also take work.

It's similar to startups. Ideas are cheap and easy, but executing them well
(profitably) is hard.

------
derefr
To put this in more actionable vocabulary: don't count features you've built,
count _user stories_ you've satisfied. Frequently the same small subset of
your features make up the key steps in almost all your stories, while the rest
of your features can't really find a business use-case at all (because the
user will be more likely to chain together other, more familiar features, or
chain your feature with features from other products, to accomplish the task
instead.)

------
endtime
>There you go. You don't get it. Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW
or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be.

Perhaps beside the point, but...I can't be the only one who things that
Windows 7 is a vastly better experience than OS X.

~~~
a4agarwal
Maybe Windows 7 is better than OS X. But to get there, I'm sure the Windows
team used OS X extensively to see what it does well, what it does poorly.

Someone who hasn't even tried the best has no way to build something better.

------
maguay
Only problem is, when it comes to blogging, I thought Tumblr was the one
focused totally on experience and ease of use. Posterous still feels more like
it's trying to give you every feature available and then some...

------
mattmaroon
I love people who believe themselves arbiters of taste. You use Windows,
therefore you don't know what style is. You don't drive a BMW, therefore your
opinion about software is uninformed.

And German cars suck. What they don't understand, and why Lexus vastly
outsells them, is that the car breaking down every 20k miles is a significant
blemish on their user experience. The inattention to detail could be
overlooked, even the little GPS knob, which is the worst user interface ever
designed, if they could just make it onto an IQS list once.

~~~
a4agarwal
The exact quote was, "Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you
don't even realize how great the experience can be"

I never said that you _can't_ use Windows, an Android, or drive another car.
But at some point you need to use the top end product to really appreciate
what's out there. If you spend your whole life on Windows/BlackBerry/Toyota,
you might not understand what a great product is.

Before the iPhone came out, no one knew how great a phone could be. Even I
didn't. The iPhone made me understand how you can take an existing feature
set, and dramatically change a product through the experience.

You're going with a blanket, "German cars suck"? Really? I'd bet German cars
have more fanatics than Japanese cars do. German cars delight people.

Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car. To me, a Lexus
is just a high end Honda. It gets me from point A to point B, with a bit more
luxury. One of Lexus's problems is that they don't have a vision, a passion.
They just pump out what people will buy:

[http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-
while-...](http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-while-they-
created)

And yes, BMW sucks at interface design. Where they excel is in building the
ultimate driving machine. I'm all for BMW outsourcing their tech:

[http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-
for-...](http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-for-bmw-
thats-bui)

~~~
donaq
_Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car_

While the definition of "better" varies from person to person,

 _They just pump out what people will buy_

the definition of a successful business is rather less subjective. Pumping out
what people will buy is pretty much what makes a business successful. I'm not
sure what point you're trying to make about the success of a product? Isn't a
successful product the one with the most users?

~~~
vetinari
>> They just pump out what people will buy

> the definition of a successful business is rather less subjective. Pumping
> out what people will buy is pretty much what makes a business successful.
> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about the success of a
> product? Isn't a successful product the one with the most users?

We are talking about better products, not successful businesses. For example,
Britney Spears outsells Tchaikovsky, but no one would argue that she makes
better music.

~~~
mattmaroon
I would, because better is an absolute. It's better in some respects, less
good in some, and therefore overall it depends on how you weight the
attributes.

I find it pretty awful myself, but a lot of people prefer it, therefore in a
sense it is better.

------
madh
Does anyone know who said "It's about experience" first? I keep hearing this
great principle rehashed over and over.

