Engineers Love Features
They crave the latest technology, they need the latest widget and given the option an engineer that is developing a product will go all out to solve all the technical challenges that they can think of and incorporate them all into the product.
The problem here isn't really that the Engineers want to solve as many cool problems as possible and jam it into whatever product that they are developing, it is rather that they don't recognize that most end users don't want them all. And also to pick up on my earlier post, that the Product Managers don't exercise enough control over their product.
The paradox here is that when the Engineer is a consumer of a product they recognize well designed products over badly designed ones and will probably choose the former rather than the later. I say probably because there could always be that one kick arse feature that they want in some crappier product (Div X support in a DVD player for example).
The reason that Engineers don't see a problem with the product or program is
The reason that Engineers don't see a problem with the product or program is
They have a much higher Threshold of Complexity.
Basically they don't tend to be bothered by a device having 48 buttons instead of 4. One example that springs to mind is a washing machine. Before the advent of fancy control circuitry a washing machine probably only had one controller, a knob you turned to the desired wash cycle, now you can get ones with LCD displays and a menu system and 20 buttons all controlling different specific features. Now while the Engineer may not be bothered with this display of controls the average user (my mother for example) would look at it and have a slight panic attack.
Actually, I think Engineers just have creativity along the "features" axis. They think "If I have feature X, I can do this, if I have feature Y, I can do that". The idea of a feature is inherently malleable, and there will generally be one thing that they think about doing with that feature.
ReplyDeleteClueless users will see a feature and cannot think of even a single thing they can do with it. Hence they are overwhelmed by the many buttons which do (apparently) nothing. These guys are unfortunately the guys who get catered to, where really we should be telling them to go look elsewhere.
Creative users will see a single feature and think of a *million* things they could do with it. They're overwhelmed because of the possibilities. Often, you'll want to set up a minimal feature and watch a creative user go nuts with it. Twitter is an example app where there is a simple feature but creative users. The engineers have effectively leveraged those users and tuned the software for them.
For some reason I can't help but think of the quote.
ReplyDelete"To the man with a hammer everything is a nail."
To the engineer everything needs more features.
Does the user really want a peg that tells the time or just something to hold the clothes on the line.
(Good point you make though)