What Turns a User Request into a Successful Feature?
We build custom software. By definition, we learn what to build by talking with users! Users ask for a lot of things, and it can be tempting to just say yes to every request. But it’s a bad plan to say yes without a critical evaluation and a look at the bigger picture: often what people ask for is awkward, or complex to build, or just plain not what they really need or even want.
I can think of someone last week who asked me for a data archiving tool (expensive) when what was truly needed was some list filtering features (much cheaper). The requester just didn’t know such filtering tools were possible, so they asked for what they thought was needed, a method to get older records out of the way. I asked some questions about what specifically was driving the need to archive records, and we found our way to the idea of list searching and filtering features, to get those unwanted records hidden without actually having to move them anywhere. We needed to make those filtering features easy to find and really fast to use, so we chose to have a few commonly used filters right in our toolbar area where one click can get the user the records they want.
Our expertise – as business analysts, as technology experts, as designers – is the catalyst to turn user requests into truly useful and usable designs.
Read more about Why the User is Not Always Right
