Feature Upselling

Recently I found myself in the deep dark world of buying the various multi-colored accessories required to support a new born baby. Amongst the various things I needed to buy was a new baby monitor, as for some reason, our old one had decided to pack up completely in the four years it’s been sat in a sealed box (go figure).
So, anyway. Upon looking for said baby monitor I encountered the vast listings of products available on Amazon. All I wanted was a monitor that could let me listen to whatever was happening upstairs in little Max’s bedroom. Initially I was after something simple like this.

Features? Well, it let’s you listen to the baby, and also has a nightlight as a small added extra. Perfect for the requirements in hand – although the nightlight is an added bonus.
So, then I got looking for what else there might be, and from then on it gets a whole lot worse (unless you are especially paranoid). For instance, let’s take this one for example:

It can (deep breath) monitor humidity, monitor temperature, indicate connection drop out, indicate noise via a traffic light system, adjust the sensitivity, communicate over 330m (!) play lullabies, shine a night light, give an out of range warning, show when the battery is flat, vibrate and even tell you when it’s switched on.

Lovely.

However, think back to what your requirements are. You, as a parent, what to know if the child is crying. That’s really the only actually useful use for a monitor. Anything else is an up-sell to make the product more attractive to you, the buyer, and to make you part with that extra £60 you weren’t going to spend when you saw the first model.

So, how the hell does this relate to the web, and web applications? Well, think about your dream product, and then think about all of the wonderful things it could, all those snazzy little features that someone might find useful, things that would make it really cool.

Now picture Microsoft’s Word word processor – how many of the features in that application do you genuinely use day to day? I would guess you probably use the bolds and underlines etc, occasionally dipping into something more advanced like a table of contents. How often do you even look at any of the other stuff? How many of you can honestly say, for instance, that you’ve used the citations functionality, or the macros (and remember, word is one of the simpler parts of the office suite).

Now picture Word as the fully featured baby monitor, when all you really need is the simple one. You need a wordpad. After all, it does most of what you want, and you already have it.

So, Word is fine having all these features sat there waiting there in case you might want to use them right? Well yes, except you are paying for it. You are paying for all the features that you might want to use. You are paying for a whole load of things that you might need one day – if you’re lucky. It’s a common adage in the IT industry that only 20% of the features are used by 80% of the user-base.
So, why, as someone developing a web application would you want to pay for developing stuff that your users will only maybe use. Why would you not want to build fewer features, costing less money, less time, and ultimately making your application more stable.

Well, in part, marketing departments are to blame – they want to have one up on everyone else, they want their application to do one more thing than the competition, but remember – less software is easier to manage, less software means less maintenance, and less software means less bugs and less support needed therefore making happier users.

Build your product on one or two things it does exceptionally well, rather than the 90 things it does OK you’ll make your life a lot easier.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 18 Mar 2009