Hacker News Reader

Comment by largehotcoffee | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure iterating like crazy is a good thing.

To be clear, our iterating like crazy is getting customer feedback and making new features or products to test new ideas as fast as possible.

A few weeks ago I was asked to make a dashboard for a client of ours on the last evening of our hack week. In two hours I had a proof of concept up, the client had a live URL and gave us feedback immediately. We are now devoting resources to making it real. We have angular to thank for that...

Source: I work at chartbeat.

Also you should checkout our product demos, our quality of product is never sacrificed. The newest dashboards really are quite useful and beautiful.

Well, the alternative is working for days / weeks on a feature that the end-user may not even use (is the message I'm getting from this article). Being able to create and alter a feature quickly is important in an agile environment.

There are better ways to discover whether a feature is wanted than hacking up a test version and seeing if the users use it. The idea is to test whether people want it before that stage. You can ask them, but often they'll say yes regardless because things often sound great. On the most basic level, adding a UI element that responds with nothing more than a "Coming soon!" message and measuring if anyone clicks it works brilliantly.

That has to be one of the most frustrating UI patterns out there, clicking a button and not knowing whether it will do what it says or say "haha, nope!". It's bad enough when apps do this to try and persuade you to upgrade to the pro version.

What you want to know is not just whether people click the button , but whether having a certain feature available changes the way that people actually use your application.

Doesn't that have essentially the same problem as asking? If is see a new UI element after an update to an app I use, of course I'm going to click it to see what it is, even if it looks like something I don't actually need.

I didn't really discuss this in the article at all, but frequently we hack up a test version (or a simple graph visualization) for internal evaluation, without showing to users at all. To your point, lots of things that sound great don't end up being that great, and we can catch a lot of those things internally before even showing them to users.

What if we graph this thing over a month? Hmmm, sort of always looks like a straight line for all of our test client datasets, and you can't really gain any insight from it. Let's try something different. etc etc.

It works kind of like how chanting "are we there yet? Are we there yet?" makes long drives shorter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com