Your App Has One Feature | Hacker News Reader

Your App Has One Feature

blog.benroux.me

49 pointsliquidise7 comments

As a user more than an engineer, most of the apps I use have 'one feature,' but the one feature that's important to me is different than the one feature that's important to other people. My 'one feature' may also be a unique combination of smaller features that, when brought together, solve one very important problem for me, and some different combination of smaller features in the same tool will solve a different problem for someone else.

Agreed. When I seek out a new program, I usually have some specific goal that my current software doesn't cover, which usually means that it's something fairly "out there", and not even necessarily a core feature of whichever software I find.

Still, a program needs a guiding light to its design. It has at least one purpose, and that purpose should be the central focus of its design. That doesn't mean there can't be ancillary features, of course.

This reminds me of this article by Joel Spolsky on Excel:

Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html

Huh?

Okay, maybe a lot of people do use it for formatting tables.

But what do people who do tabular calculations use?

98% of the time, Excel.

> What is the one thing that, when removed from your product, makes it fall apart?

A big block comment in common.h containing the Hail Mary intercession prayer.

I actually think it does have one feature: the ability to edit text.

For all the other things (syntax highlighting, VCS integration, debugger, test framework, compiler shortcuts), you can take away two or three of them and still have a worthwhile program.

But if the text editing part is non-existent or painful to use (think only emacs bindings to a vim user, and vice versa)? It's game over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com