Comment by johnkarahalis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnkarahalis | Hacker News Reader

Feature addiction is real.

This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more and more and more for no real benefit.

I've quoted this before, but what Don Norman says in The Invisible Computer still applies:

"Don’t ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated."

A useful metaphor we use in game dev: Players are the patient, you are the doctor. They're great at finding pain, but not at knowing how to heal it. It's on you to figure out what the underlying problem is and how to solve it.

Also, some of my favorite quotes on this subject:

You listen to all your fans and they always say "You should add this" or "You should add that." They never say "Take this out, take that out." They say "add more, add more!" There's an old saying that I love about design, it's about Japanese gardening actually, that "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove." I think a lot of designers think the opposite way - "What else can we add to the game to make it better?" -Will Wright

"People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” -Steve Jobs

"Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die.

It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need." -Alan Moore

I’m not saying this to argue against your points: I’m a fan of Tangerine bank and have been continually and loudly telling them to remove the balances on the account overview screen as it now triggers “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology.

I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.

You're asking a bank to remove visible account balances from a dashboard view?

I think it’s a valid request. I wish Apple’s iMessage App would allow hiding or moving conversations to folders to remove from sight. I may have an emotional or upsetting text with someone that I don’t necessarily want to see every time I open the app, but also don’t want to delete it. Or may need to use my phone in a presentation etc, and not want to show certain messages.

However adding an option to remove it as adding a feature, not taking one away.

The app was not complete without that feature. In the ideal state of the app, it was not something you could take away.

Or so I can reason around that logic anyhow.

Aha, I see why there’s been pushback.

To be more clear: I only want to see the balances from specific accounts. The two chequing accounts in this case.

I don’t want to see the savings account that has a slowly (and automatically) increasing balance because then I subconsciously count that as “too much” and think things like “I could spend a little and it wouldn’t make a big difference”.

To be fair, I’m also working hard at shifting my brain after a lifetime of ‘paycheque to paycheque’ patterns and it’s not enjoying the shift.

Really off-topic here, but for savings accounts that are going to tick up over time and don’t need to be available within 24 hours, you can open a savings account with a different bank that has better savings interest rates and set up an automatic or manual transfer to that savings every month. You can shop around for the best interest rates, but I’ve seen Ally be consistently better than anything I have locally.

The benefit of having it in a separate bank is that it hugely increases friction when you start thinking about spending it, since you have to move it back to your primary first. You can mostly forget about the specific numbers in it as well since it isn’t visible in your primary bank dashboard.

No that’s an excellent idea. I was doing this for a bit with my “old” bank and thinking that Tangerine was the only good no-fee bank with the best interest rates so I had not reappraised that lately.

I just looked and there are other options available. I think this might be the excuse for me to go to Wealthsimple and start taking a more active role in making that money do some work.

Can't really tell if this is sarcasm or not...

Understandable. I am saying it genuinely.

The replies I made to other users will hopefully clear it up.

Conversely, I'd consider an account overview without a balance to be useless. That's what an overview is for. shrug

Yeah ING lets you see the balance without having to log in, and sometimes it's great to just check how it's going

Sorry, I realize I was not bringing in enough background to explain why it mattered.

You’re right for sure, and I do find benefit in the account overview, it’s just that I only want to see the “spending” accounts, and not the long-term savings accounts.

Much like it might change your financial choices if your bank overview also showed your available credit (instead of the balance owing) and a realtime update of home equity.

If “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology is a struggle for you, a better banking overview screen will not set you free, but YNAB will:

https://www.youneedabudget.com/

(Not affiliated, just a happy customer that finally broke decades of bad financial habits due to this app and its attendant personal finance philosophy.)

After skimming past recommendations for YNAB I looked it over just now, and because of Tangerine’s multiple accounts (max is about 15) as well as the money-transfer automation, I’ve actually been using the same principles just within my bank tools.

That’s why I was frustrated when they changed from a summary of chequing account balances to a full “dashboard” that showed all accounts.

Up until then I was doing awesome avoiding the “I’m flush with cash” triggers because I was only seeing my actual spending money and not the bills account, the rent account, and the various proactive savings accounts.

Essentially I had all the benefits of YNAB principles because of the tools Tangerine provided

I don't know, sometimes I enjoy the very cluttered and busy design of something like Yakuza 5.

Similarly, GTA V is successful and complex. But Untitled Goose Game didn't do too bad either.

There's upsides and downsides to complex and simple games. Fortnite may be simple in some aspects (basically a war game) but it's more complex than Temple Run.

Both cater to different markets but achieve simplicity within their markets well.

I love lots of classic games like Contra which are at their heart very simple. But Yakuza 5 has everything from rhythm games to a little arena shooter built in and it's all optional content. A lot of it is kind of half-baked because it's so ambitious. That's kind of fun in its own way.

I don't think it is useful to think in terms of simplicity vs. complexity. Good design is about knowing what features work well together. Composition, harmony and efficiency are more important than minimalism.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

Most times when users say they won't use a product because it's missing a feature:

- Those specific users won't use it anyway even if you add it

- The problem they identified is a legitimate problem that was preventing other people from using it

- Whether your metrics actually go up depends on where that feature was in the critical path of your funnel. All else being equal, fixing legitimate problems with your product is unlikely to move your metrics much, because most (randomly distributed) problems aren't at the frontier of the critical path.

It's a mistake to think that adding features that customers ask for will immediately improve your core metrics, but it's also a mistake to think that features that don't visibly improve your core metrics were a mistake to add.

> Those specific users won't use it anyway even if you add it

I think people read this and think, "Why bother, then?"

As someone who is often this user, I don't end up using your product because I've already moved onto a competing product or service; or because I never hear that you have added the feature. Whether your metrics move after adding the feature might be a matter of timing.

There's also the chance I will come to your product in the future. Hypothetically, let's say you offer a password vault application, but I dislike it because it lacks a feature I want, so I end up going with your competitor who offers the feature. You add the feature, but I don't switch because I'm now content with your competitor. Later, your competitor starts pushing towards a subscription model while simultaneously showing a real lack of professionalism and social grace towards customers in public. Since you've added the feature that I thought was lacking, your product might now be an option for me. If you haven't added the feature, there's still no chance.

> competitor starts ... showing a real lack of professionalism

Betting on eventual competitor's incompetence in the future - is not a reliable strategy.

In such situation it may be better to implement that feature only when entrenched competitor with that feature will start pushing their customers away.

This situation is further complicated when you’re making enterprise software where the purchaser often isn’t a user and the majority of the users don’t have a say in the purchasing decision.

A smart purchaser will define their purchasing criteria based on the needs of their users, but in practice, I’ve found that some haven’t done an accurate job of determining their users needs, and/or inject their own agendas into the requirements.

> Those specific users won't use it anyway even if you add it

These users often understand what features are missing because they rely on them in other products. At that point your product is already dead to them.

Some of the best advice I've been given on this is to look at how the potential customer is already solving the problem today. If they're just ignoring the problem altogether, then they're not going to spend any money on you to solve it. If they're spending considerable time and/or money working around or manually solving the problem (maybe by working weekends, or buying a whole team of vendors, or outsourcing to Mechanical Turk type stuff), and you can solve the problem for them for less money and/or time, then it's a feature worth shipping.

It can give false negatives, especially with future looking and platform-type work, but it's a great heuristic for weeding out useless feature work

Having watched recordings of people using our product and spent too much time reading their reviews and feature requests, I can safely say that neither does the average user know what he wants or needs, nor can he articulate what the current problems or improvements are.

It gets worse when you have a specialist of a given field consulting you on how to build software with his field in mind.

“A fish doesn’t think of water” is a fitting quote I once heard.

All you can do is observe, tweak and test.

Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." (probably misattributed, but fitting nonetheless)

I really liked Blizzard of Ghostcrawler era - he plainly stated that they listen to users carefully to identify problems, but do not listen to them carefully about the proposed solutions. And well - his design team got stuff mostly right.

Designing user research around watching people do something, and figuring out their needs is something I've covered in a recent post: https://adnankhan.space/user-research/2020/01/28/ask-users-f.... The idea is that your research objectives could be very different from what you're actually testing.

I think if we look at Excel, we see that additional features were welcomed and it became very big, same with Word, but then we look at today's google docs and spreadsheet from google and wonder where all that stuff went, but we adapt and now i am fine with simplicity

Sounds like the XY problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

The problem is that there's only one list for everything. Allow owners to create differing lists and this would not be so.

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