Making better products

With more and more web products hitting the market everyday, the importance of delivering value to end users through your product has become paramount.

If you are building a product from scratch, prioritization of features becomes the most critical task and this can determine success or failure for your product. Most of us product managers love to add features - customizable user interfaces, changing password, RSS feeds etc. Faced with such a situation, here are questions that I usually like to ask myself

• Is your feature solving a particular problem of your user segment ?
• Is the feature adding value to the way your end users solve their problem ?
• Is feature increasing usability or improving the user experience in the product?
• Is the feature cracking a technology problem which others have failed to solve ?

Prioritizing features can be quite a daunting task for your entire product team - from product managers to technical architects keeping in mind that you still need to build a great v1.0 and hit the market within time and budget.

Many product companies, especially startups have failed because of this critical reason. 37signals’ Getting real is a great read to understand the dynamics involved in building web products.

So is there any best way to solve the prioritization problem ? Well, there’s a technique that I have been using, some parts inspired from here.

It’s a simple four quandrant technique with two axeses

• Difficulty of implementation on the X axis - This indicates the time, effort, cost and technology complexity of implementation a particular feature. This ranges from low to high
• Business Value on the Y axis - This indicates the business value of the feature in terms of revenue, greater user adopting, cost savings etc.

Get your entire product team involved in this exercise, first starting out with a list of all possible features which you can build into the product. Then get the product management/business team to evaluate all the proposed features on their business value. Get the technical team to evaluate the difficulty of implementing each of the features.

Then map the features into the four quadrants as shown above.

• High business value, Low difficulty level- These are what I call the “Cash cows”. These are features that you would definitely include in your product as they bring maximum value with least effort. No brainer!
• High business value, High difficulty level - This is the tricky part. These might be your niche features, or features which separate your product from the rest in the segment. These features are strategic investments that you might need to make for the success of your product. Rethink about each of these features and how they can potentially be simplified to move them to the left. Also evaluate features from this category which you want in V1 and push some for V2.
• Low business value, low difficulty level - These features are straightforward abilities which are present in most of your competing products. Make sure that you don’t add all these features into your product to avoid feature bloat. Think about how you can potentially make simple changes and move them up the value chain. Think about whether these can be monetized in any way and check if you can change the way these features have been implemented by your competitors.
• Low business value, high difficulty level - These are features that you want to stay away from as they provide very less value.

So, what do you think about the effectiveness of this method ? Let me know the techniques that you have for prioritizing features.

Update: A great read from the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) blog on the similar topic and tips for product mangers : Great Products by Design

NetLife Research is a Norwegian based User Experience design and consulting firm. For the last couple of years they have been releasing a bad usability calendar which is meant to show examples of bad UX and usability.

This year’s calendar has great examples of exaggerated use of web 2.0 design,social bookmarking proliferation, drop down menus, message feeds etc.

You can download this year’s calender here.

Interesting way to portray UX and design bloppers!

I was at the Bangalore startup lunch last Saturday at the NSCREL, IIM Bangalore. It was a good event overall, with participation from about 8 startups. The agenda of startup lunch was to provide a platform for Startups and Job seekers, so that they can get know startups better, their work culture and the works. Went to the event with no specific goal as a job seeker, but ended up having interesting conversations with many founders. The organizing team has a nice scoop of the event here.

Kudos to the organizing team for putting up a great show!Great job guys - Sridhar, Ashish and Pradeep !

If you are interested in working for a startup - here’s a list of startups in Bangalore along with positions that they are looking for.

If you were at the event, these are pics from Pradeep.

Jason from 37signals had a blog post on questioning your work. I think that everyone startup or for that matter any company doing anything worthwhile should ask these questions. Here’s what they propose. The image below is from Jason’s presentation at SXSW.

The above tenets make a lot of sense and it’s worth looking at this the next time you decide to start doing something.

Wow! this is quite some news. Never imagined something like this to happen.

Microsoft Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications will now be available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world’s leading smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.  Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way. This move will enable S60 application developers to use a wider range of dev environments.

Here’s the offiicial press release from Nokia.

This is BIG for Microsoft and Silverlight, as the collaboration with Nokia will enable taking the Silverlight experience to millions of users on devices which will be used everyday by end users. This will also be a lithmus test for Silverlight for ensuring it’s cross platform compatibility.

I think that is a great move, which will enable mobile users to see their applications move to the next level of user experience and usability.  I am personally looking forward to seeing some great mobile apps built on Silverlight. Some demos are expected at the MIX.

Scoble claims to have been moved to tears after seeing a demo by the Microsoft Research team.

Something like this coming from Scoble is quite rare and this of course led to an avalanche of blog posts and predictions as to what this ground breaking thing could be. Popular predictions included Photosynth , Seadragon etc.

Scoble then came back with ‘Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry’

One particular line caught my attention

The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before.

And this

 That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

Wonder what this could be ? Any predictions ? Btw, as per Scoble’s claims we would be getting to know about this by Feb 27.

Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.

Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago).  I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.

I think this product has some great potiential (especially going  by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market  and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.

Below is a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats ) analysis I did on their product.

Note : The opinions expressed here are totally from my perception of the product

It’s all about MyTinyJesus - Saviour 2.0.

No explanations. No FAQ. Just a figure of Jesus which keeps on emitting random Twitter posts in cartoon-like balloons. Pointless? Probably. Cool? Definitely.

What do you think ?

Isn’t this game incredibly cool, check the video below. Looks like you really need to know your physics well to play this one This one is from Kloonigames and runs on the tablet PC. A PC version of crayon physics is coming soon.

The user experience on this is incredible, watch how the game reacts as the user draws different figures and tries to achieve their objective. With the Wii and PS3 giving PC games a run for their money, I think innovative concepts like this one are a really good answer.

This makes me wonder about the process of gathering requirements for this game. I’m thinking, there are so many scenarios that need to be captured and then taking a call on which ones the game needs to support and deciding others to be left out. Phew ! It’s actually my dream to do requirements, scenarios and functional specifications for a gaming product. Wouldn’t that be cool

Stuck in Seattle with the rain and a marathon requirements gathering session :). So no barcamp for me this time. Damn! the collectives were really good this time and some very interesting topics.

Anyways if you are at barcamp and are blogging/liveblogging or microblogging, leave me your link as a comment, I’m going to be following this from here And of course kudos to the organizers, impressive list of sponsors!

And yo! found some really nice badges on the BCB5 site, so if you are blogging make sure that you use them.