Project Management: Wrapped Around the Axle
Sometimes during product development features are really
hard to get a handle on. It's hard to predict exactly how
people will use certain features, and hard to know the value
people will place on them. In the absence of clear input from
actual customers, engineers sometimes go overboard imagining
possible customer use-cases. Steve Fox of InfoWorld
comments on this in May
the best tech win.
Products that result from over engineering are needlessly
complex because they have too many unnecessary capabilities.
Here's an example of a group of engineers getting wrapped
around the axle on product design.
I once listened to an engineer recount an amusing firsthand
story of how his company built the most ridiculous user
interface he had ever seen. (Just so you know, this was a
large well-known company). His design group had decided that
it would be really cool if their customers could design their
own user interfaces for their software products. The company
would provide a default user interface, but customers could
completely reconfigure it to meet their needs. All the
software products the company would sell would provide this
capability. The customer could reconfigure and rename all the
menus, dialogs and windows. They could resize dialog boxes,
resize and rename buttons and controls, and move them around
to fit their needs. They had full control over fonts and text
styles for the entire user interface. They could even change
the style and color of controls so they would look "more
cool." All the products the company would sell would be
based upon a software framework that provided those features.
What could be cooler than that? The "ultimate" in
flexibility!
Problem was, customers never asked for it. They had no idea
why they'd need all this control. They just wanted to use the
products, not redesign them. Customers thought it was stupid
and hard to use. Soon everyone realized it was the dumbest
thing they had ever produced. After a painful and expensive
two years, it was scrapped.
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