[Sigia-l] RE: Re: IA and semiotics - and standards?

[gunnar]

Jon,
Great post.

You write:
 
> They are about the feeling the user has when viewing the product. 
> That people do not cook in the microwave - that there will never be 
> a scenario to "Cook Thanksgiving turkey" is beside the point. The 
> perceived value of the potential feature is high enough to encourage 
> many/most customers to spend money on larger/more powerful/feature 
> rich microwaves that they do not need. (And this can have a 
> significantly positive impact on profit margins.) Likewise for SUV's 

In my opinion much can be said about the psychology of the purchase. It is not
what you get, it is what you can avoid getting rid of.
I believe that there is some kind of anxiety on the part of the customer, who
actually pays for not having to make the tough decision to "do without".
You can charge for a feature - not because the customer wants it, but rather
because he does not know if he will want it in some distant future. And he is
willing to pay you in order to avoid making the decision.

So yes - it is beside the point whether the feature is ever going to be used,
but the reason - in my best guess - is not the same as yours. There may not be
value at all in that feature. You just don't know if you will want it. So the
value is in the pleasant knowledge that you did not burn your bridges. You can
always ......
(Expandability is the same..)


> polluting the interface that supports required features. I think one 
> successful example of this is "Advanced Search." Lots of great 
> features there, all out of the way but always available. I think the 
> practice of only showing "most recently used" menu items in Word is 
> terrible because it is so unpredictable.
> 

Advanced search - as you state above - is a very good example of something
which end users seldom use, but which our clients often want. Fortunately
advanced search is often cheaper to build than a decent simple search, but in
other scenarios this might not be the case.

Feature creep is not always because geeks can't control their urge to put more
cool features on. Nor is it always because clients think they are so damned
inspired and innovative when they come up with those little "darlings".

Sometimes you just don't have the time to weed them out of the specs, because
you know it will take a lot of convincing rhetoric and cocksure data from
independent sources to persuade the client to make the decision that we do not
need this.

Fortunately some clients are able to make this type of decision themselves.
Even if it means that they cannot easily go back and make their decision
"undone". I like those clients better.

BTW: I and my wife use the micro to heat milk for our 4 months old daughter
and for our chai, to defrost meats, to cook fish and broccolli etc. It is on
at least 5 times a day. I think the microwave oven is an excellent invention,
and I would never want to "go back" to not having one - so no back button for me. 
But I have to admit. I would like to have 8 "bookmarks" in the form of
programmed buttons for "popcorn", "baby milk" etc. It takes 4-6 buttons (no
dials) to start it, and my 8 year old daughter does not always remember if it
is 30 seconds, 3 minutes or perhaps 30 minutes to make her popcorn (I have yet
to see how 30 minutes popcorn look .. fortunately). The time setting is done
by three buttons one for 10 sec. one for 1 minute and one for 10 minutes. They
sit side by side, so it is actually a matter of physical lay out of the
buttons and confusing left with right. 

Gunnar Langemark
gunnar at langemark.com