> Power users were happy with all the features and all the options, but the extra baggage made it harder for less technical people to use the product.<p>Poor design. Seriously. Simplicity is really really hard. Much harder than throwing a ton of settings, toggles, and switches at a user.<p>Your design has to be ridiculously simple, but be flexible enough to allow complexity when it is called for. It's hard to put into words, but I frequently spend months refining an interface to fit just right.<p>The best example of this is an operating system. Windows has to be simple enough for the least computer literate person to use, but flexible enough for you to configure anything you can imagine via the registry or command line. There is no link to the registry in the start menu. But every power user knows how to launch it. The complexity is possible, it's there, but it's hidden. It doesn't bother the new guy because he doesn't even know about it. Only the power use can find it.<p>If you prefer an example with Mac OS, the operating system by default is unbelievably limiting. There is very little you can configure via the settings. Pull out the terminal and you can change absolutely everything you can imagine. Again, the complexity and features are there ... but hidden. They don't interfere with the regular user experience, but they're there if needed by the power user.<p>Ditto for Linux.
The problem isn't power users. The problem is that people adapt to features. It's extremely difficult to remove a poorly thought out feature after the fact. People will complain, whether or not they're power users. People are change averse, even when it's just skin deep. When it changes their workflow, they're going to scream bloody murder.<p>Edit: There are very good points being made about knowing your target audience, designing for simplicity, etc. But in the end, if you change your user's workflow, they're not going to be happy, even if the end result is a better product.
No one knows that business more than Nick but this part struck me as possibly faulty logic:<p>"So with each new version I tried to simplify the user interface, and dropped features & options that complicated the product. FeedDemon became more popular as a result, but you’d never know it if you visited my online support forums."<p>I'm wondering if this is correlation problem - in other words, Nick perceives that the popularity of FeedDemon is due to his simplifying the design, however it is also possible that a rise in both the awareness of what RSS is/does and a corresponding search for tools led to the popularity. It could also be the additional press/marketing received from the Newsgator acquisition helped. It could be that Google Reader's concept was great but people decided it was too simple/not good enough and they wanted a power tool for RSS (thus Google found/educated people for Nick).<p>I'm just wondering if the foundation of Nick's particular business was built with the power users and it was the power users who got the word out about FeedDemon. If that's the case, then he's drawing the wrong conclusion and thus the future of FeedDemon is in danger.<p>I've been a FD user for 5+ years, I guess, and I certainly was one of those bloggers talking about it back in 2006 or 2007. I'm certainly in the power users category so I don't really know that I can be objective here.
I can see a case being made that a consumer product shouldn't add features that will hurt its main consumers for the benefit of a minority of users. That said, it's reckless and short-sighted to proactively exclude power users.<p>When someone becomes proficient with your product, guess what they become? A power user. And if you don't have any features to cater to them, do you expect them to be using your product much longer? And once <i>they</i> stop using your product, do you expect anyone else to as well?
One could very easily argue that the USER ought to be empowered to take control of the UI. I'll use MS Excel as an example of a tool that I've used with regularity since it came to market. MS thought they knew better and utterly destroyed the UI with the introduction of Office 2007. As anyone who was a power user prior to that version and you are very likely to get a nearly unanimous thumbs-down on the changes. The ribbon interface, as well as other choices MS made, took a power user and made him/her feel like a total idiot. Could you learn it? Sure. Could you find the commands you needed? Of course. And, for a period of days and weeks your productivity went down to nearly zero. Here is a case of a company thinking it knew better and pushing forward changes that actually destroyed productivity in a massive way.<p>That sort of thing led me to thinking that users ought to be empowered to completely customize their UI. Keep the mainstream on the new shiny thing, but enable a setting that allows me to use a text editor to completely redo all of your choices. Create a marketplace for the sharing of these config files under source control too. A mechanical engineer will have different needs than an executive assistant, not in complexity but rather in context and workflow.
As a power user[1], I want you to consider every time I have to change a setting like a punch to the face. Your software should just work. It's a tool. I don't want to spend my time tweaking tools ... I'm not 15 anymore. I have better things to do with my life.<p>When was the last time you saw a "power user" configuring a hammer?<p>[1] 80% of waking hours behind a computer, most of the software I use, I use several hours daily
This strikes me as a failure to communicate to people whether they are your targeted audience or not. Even something as simple as a "RSS Feeds for mere mortals" or "Why Users Love This Basic RSS Reader" could be enough to correctly align this app wrt user expectations.<p>Emphasis on simplicity + social proof:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/f2wxZ.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/f2wxZ.png</a>
Or just be smart: hide power options under power user tab/button/whatever. Not-power-users gets simply design and most useful tools (for them). Power-users gets powerful tools.
The real power users have even more impatience and demand as much simplicity in usage as beginners.<p>The folks that derive some satisfaction from doing things with a million manual settings (or doo dads) aren't really an addressable market, because lots of open source is that way.<p>Maybe it's just me
I disagree. Build products for yourself. If you're a power user, then so be it. If you're making a product to make your life easier and you happen to be a newb, then design with that in mind. Screw profitability[1].<p>[1] I may not make the best CEO...
Yeah, in user interface design everything should be as non-geeky as possible, but not non-geekier. :)<p>Sometimes it is really hard to figure out how geeky your potential customers are. I am building a markdown editor, and while I am trying to make it as non-geeky as possible it is not completely clear how non-geeky a markdown editor user can be at all as the most non-geeky users just probably stick with WYSWYG editors.
I really miss the "mark as unread" contextual button, but even without it FeedDemon is by far the best RSS reader I have. (The premium version is worth the money).<p>Also, lately I see a lot of great lessons from "lone wolfs" like Nick (FeedDemon), Marco (Instapaper) and Mark (Pinboard).
Surely this is solved already?<p>There should be two layers.<p>You aim to create the simplest, most elegant product to monetize your basic consumers.<p>But, if there is a market for it -- and there may well not be in the case of FeedDemon --, you can also provide an extendible platform/API below the UX on which developers can build out innovative functionality for power users. This is fairly low cost and can have multiplier effects. If a market arises on the platform, you can copy the best ideas of your smartest users or you can provide B2B tools to automate tasks for those that are interested in paying.
As a power user myself, and the free tech guy for a family of casual users, I totally agree with this approach.<p>An application for power users doesn't just have a few advanced features or configuration switches. It has to be fully designed with different goals in mind.<p>Ease of learning vs efficiency, non-intimidating UI vs configurability, prettiness vs speed of usage; they're often at odds with each other, and while I'm sure some great examples of applications sitting comfortably in the fence can be found, most end up as a shitty experience for everyone.
I increasingly think this as time goes by. Also, the similarly related "Think about the first 20 minutes, or the user who only uses your product once in a blue moon".<p>Every time (about once every two months) I use screen I have to go and re-read the man page. byobu tells me in the bottom corner I can press 'F9' to get a menu, which then has some help. I'm sure this 'waste of screen' will annoy power users, but I find it saves both time and annoyance, on those rare occasions I want to keep a terminal open on a remote machine.
> I’d come out with new versions that I thought dramatically improved the product, only to find my forums filled with complaints from power users who wanted the return of some obscure option, or were upset that I wasn't adding the geeky features they wanted.<p>Is that the effect of Joel's 80/20 rule?
Does anyone have a statistic on the ratio of apps that are built and require users to understand programming / markup? It would be interesting to see how much we are "plaguing" the software industry by what kinds of apps we create.<p>I'm not sold by this post until I see some stats.
I totally agree. Every option added is another place for the application to go wrong. If you _need_ an option, put it in, but don't just pander to people who want to tweak everything.
HomeSite 4, wow that is a blast from the past. I still have a boxed copy somewhere, I think from the Allaire days. The program was way ahead of its time.
It's entirely possible for you to cater to the most power-usery of all power users while still letting the largely-nontechnical do their jobs with your software. Look at Emacs.<p>It's entirely possible to use Emacs (by which I mean a graphical build of GNU Emacs or XEmacs launched under a window system of some kind) like Notepad: Use the File menu to open, save, and close files, use the big X decoration at the top right to close, and that's it. Ignore everything you don't understand (<i>which people do anyway</i>) and you're golden.<p>(GVim seems to be the same way now.)<p>So screwing power users is not the only option; you <i>can</i> move the complexity down into the interface a bit and leave it to the power users to find it out, because they'll be the only ones who will.
I wish someone would finally create a choice-free mail client (web service): you just register and get an email address, and it answers everything with something vague and noncomital ('Just a note to say I got this. We'll be looking into it'...'thanks'...'Will get back to you.'...'could you call me?') etc. No need for the user to ever log in and make choices.<p>I think choice is often a veneer that divides us from a truly awesome application. Especially, but not only, when you're a pointy-haired boss. Screw the power users.