Opinionated products breed passionate customers
wking.dev
wking.dev
But the idea of the software being opinionated—and pushing those opinions on the user—sometimes leads developers to ruthlessly strip out any affordances for using it in a way the developer did not intend or anticipate. Developers should be careful to retain at least some degree of humility and not forget that they cannot possibly foresee every practical or interesting use for a product. When you're being "opinionated", you're not just shutting out the users and use cases you're consciously forgoing, you're also shutting out some that are in your blind spots.
Something like Microsoft Word would be less opinionated, it tries to be a lot of things and is only good in very few of them.
A good screwdriver is opinionated, a weird multitool that is bad at most things while also being clunky is not. A swiss pocket knife is opinionated again. Punk music is opinionated, so is jazz or drum and bass. A certain type of pop music that tries to please everybody is not. And that punk band doesn't automatically get unopinionated, because they add a little dub flavour into their music as long as they still know what they want and why.
In my eyes being opinionated is a good starting point, you then just have to decide whether the thing you decided for is the right opinion for what you are willing to achieve.
Merely importing the opinions of someone else isn't wrong, it's a phase all children (and, by extension, all learners) go through. As the person develops, they develop their own opinions, backed by experience, which either validate or disprove the opinions of their teachers; in either case, the learner has become mature in their craft, and is ready to impose their opinions on their tools, as opposed to the other way around.
> Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance.
This is not a strong opinion (sorry Derrick, I love you)
Every calendar/scheduler thinks they do this. Most are just variations of calendly (which no one loves, but does it's job).
Calendars (imo) need to stop getting enamored with scheduling and more enamored with helping people use their time wisely.
Stronger opinion: scheduling sucks - do less of it.
Stronger opinion: you should schedule your calendar exactly this way (https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/)
Stronger opinion: a full calendar doesn't make you productive. Making sure you've scheduled the things that matter to you first before you let any other events is, is the only thing that matter.
Tying the way someone calendars to a specific workflow is what matters. You saw Superhuman do this with "inbox zero." They convinced you that inbox zero means you're productive. It's the wrong metric IMO, but that's how they built out their fan base.
If someone is trying to get a calendar off the ground, they should just hire Nir as an advisor, make his workflow the default calendaring experience and start from there. That would do worlds of work for differentiating in this space where everyone largely does the same minor improvements in different colorways.
It also reminds me of Subnautica's (and Klei's) idea of being a "spikey bubble"[1]. You've got to have some spikes/opinions if you want to stand out.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkjY_R7zQsM
PS. It's strange to have "About the Author" but no name, don't you think?
Here's a strong opinion (though not a purple cow): "All scheduling should be done by phone with a physical person." Which is pretty much true for every medical office everywhere.
Here's a purple cow and strong opinion: "All scheduling should be done via blockchain." Since what we really need is an immutable record of meetings... There's no reason for this, but I'm sure it'll get attention (and funding).
I'm being cynical, but altogether agree with you. It's worth being different.
It's a shame because I do agree with the premise. Opinionated software is easy to use and therefore quickly carves out a niche with like-minded users.
We often hear about unpopular opinionated product decisions, but would love to read some good real examples where the PM has gone out on limb and it paid off.
Less and less so in Germany. And I love it, online appointment systems are far superior.
The way I understood the article, the mentioned calendar software `Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance.` by having strong opinions about how a calendar should work, and building those into the product. The quote "Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance." is not supposed to be an example of an opinion.
Thanks for those other references. Going to go check them out.
I’m not sure how this is a strong opinion. Are there really a lot of people that prefer to schedule things with inconvenience?
> Strong opinion: We provide cleanly designed forms that are easy to use for people who build digital products.
Does anyone want messy and difficult to use forms?
Here’s my strong opinion: the author’s examples don’t help to make an argument as to why opinionated products breed passionate customers.
That being said you make a good argument. Will try and add in more detail to each example!
Yesh, we found out why being strongly opinionated does not work most of the times.
All I want is a laptop that properly replaces a desktop. One that says in the brochure that "We tested it flat out for 30 days straight and it never throttled once".
Not sure how 6.5 pounds is beastly. Who even notices the weight in a backpack, or worst-case scenario, a carry-on handbag? Pretty sure a 10.0 lb laptop would be fine.
...Passionate customers promote lame products
Lame products breed indifferent customers
Indifferent customers subscribe to using opinionated products
Sorry.
Admittedly, it's much more difficult to build a high quality unopinionated software than a high quality opinionated one.
After experiencing many different proprietary apps, working professionally on both Windows and Mac systems, and studying the principles of intuitive design, I have come to the conclusion that nearly any organization who "designs for 98% of users" is actually just terrible at design and couldn't design for the 2% of power users if they tried. Either they lack the talent, or they lack the organizational flexibility to hand the reins over to the actually talented people.
"Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance" is not a strong opinion, it's a run-of-the-mill tag line.
My enjoyment of this article peaked early.
For example many creator or developer tools are created by the very people who want to be using them. They are opinionated by design because these people have an opinion on how they prefer to work with them.
This also creates a unique value proposition in the expert space given that you'd trust a tool created "by" your profession rather than a tool created "for" your profession.
not saying this is a good approach btw. if there's good software for middle aged non tech users.. LMK