I’ve noticed recently that I’ve become increasingly agitated at services that do not either readily allow access to any data I generate, and/or pro-actively work with other existing systems. Many of these are of course features I never would have expected 4 years ago.
Some examples:
- If you’re a music related site, service or software and you’re not able to read or scrobble to my last.fm, I shake my head
- In fact, I’m annoyed that my car stereo doesn’t somehow magically record what I play and that I can’t look back at my history to see what they just played on the car radio.
- Any social networking system that doesn’t try to connect / pull info from my gmail, myspace or facebook and requires me to re-enter information generally gets a pass from me.
- Working with files on a hard drive that are not in an SVN or CVS repository makes me feel vulnerable now that I use Wikis, Google Docs and SVN for everything: What happens if I want to go back? How do I share this with someone and see their changes?
- The fact that any software or service geared towards the creation of a document or data that still doesn’t have an “undo” feature or better version control irks me
- Streaming sources, or sequential documents (image galleries, etc) that do not allow random access feel like relics from the past
- Any online service (specifically social network, share-based or collaborative) that doesn’t feature a folksonomy, rating system, and/or a “others who liked this liked…” feels like a service that didn’t get the memo.
There are many more examples.
In short, know your user’s expectations before you write a feature list or a design doc. This would seem obvious but it still seems to catch honest people off guard. As it applies to games: if your user expects a waypoint based auto-save and you make them start the whole level over again, they’re going to feel that their expectations were not met. So prior to making a design doc (or in your design doc), make sure to do some competitive research and work to extrapolate some likely expectations based on how you plan to position yourself in the marketplace. It will save you a lot of costumer ‘grrs’.