I was reading this article over at Doolwind’s Game Coding Blog (video game development is a bit of a morbid curiosity of mine) where Alistair posits an interesting theory regarding “fun over features,” his own addition to the agile manifesto. In essence, the product team for a video game should focus more on adding fun to the product before throwing in more features, therefore adding actual value instead of perceived value. In other words, by focusing on the qualities proven to sell a game as opposed to all the bells and whistles that the team or stakeholders want to add, we get a real return on the investment.
In the world of business software, I would say a good analogy to this concept is “usability over features.” In other words, focus on adding that things that increase the customer’s productivity and satisfaction on core features rather than adding all the cool stuff that your competition doesn’t have. While there are sometimes provable competitive advantages to having a feature that your competitors don’t, more often than not it is the software that does the core things better that wins the race. If your word processor makes it difficult for the users to actually compose documents, they’re going to spend more time complaining about the pain of using the product rather than using all the other “cool” stuff that you added. Or, more likely, they’re just going to use a competitor’s product that edits documents better than yours.
The user experience is paramount. If you can’t focus on that aspect of the software and make it pleasurable (or at least efficient) to use your product, then you’re dead in the water before you ever even get to sell the customer on everything else that it can do. When developing a new product or even maintaining a mature one, I would consider it best to prioritize your backlog in a way that promotes the core set of features. First get the engine and the wheels on your car right before you worry about the color of the paint.
March 23rd, 2010 at 10:59 am
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