Ask HN: What's the difference between building features and a user experience? | Hacker News Reader

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

6 pointssmalter9 comments

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

Features are built so that users can do more things which will presumably improve their experience.

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?)

Maybe I answered my own question. I invite people to pontificate. Thanks.

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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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Design for the novice, configure for the pro.

who says don't focus on features?

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