It’s Not What Your Software Does, It’s What People Do With Your Software

It’s Not What Your Software Does, It’s What People Do With Your Software(bluemangolearning.com)

56 points by gdevore 15 years ago | 13 comments

The features don’t matter. It’s all about the outcomes. What can people do with your software?

I've seen software with the opposite problem-- simulation tools applied to problems outside the range they were designed to handle. For example, a tool that idealizes gases in a room as well-mixed, used to analyze smoke movement during a fire. Or a program that assumes ducts have no air leaks, used to estimate energy losses in a duct system. In cases like these, the results aren't total garbage, but they do have to be interpreted very carefully.

For some software, a feature list isn't just "what the software does." It's also a list of warnings about where the results should be taken with a grain of salt.

modernerd 15 years ago |

"The creators of Garageband for iPad didn’t care about what their software could do. They cared about what people could do with their software."

Aren't they the same thing? Feature lists describe what your software can do, which shapes what people can do with your software.

That GarageBand for iPad is accessible to all might be more to do with the platform than the featureset.

parfe 15 years ago | |

How to remove Red-eye in photoshop: http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/photoshop/ht/apsredeye.htm

How to remove Red-eye in Picasa http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/picasa/ht/redeye.htm

Both pieces of software can remove redeye. For Picasa the instructions boil down to "Click the Fix Red-eye button" whereas Photoshop involves layers, Gaussian blur, saturation, eye droppers.

Which would you say is more accessible for someone maintaining a photo album? Photoshop has more features, but Picasa is more useful to me (in a certain context, obviously.)

Flemlord 15 years ago | | |

Those Photoshop instructions are for older versions of Photoshop. In later versions, there is a "remove redeye" tool that seems to be much easier to use than Picasa's:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b...

modernerd 15 years ago | | |

I don't see that this marks a difference between 'what software does' and 'what people do'. Picasa and Photoshop both remove redeye ergo people remove redeye in both apps.

The original post seemed to be saying 'it's not the features, it's how usable they are', to which I agree wholeheartedly. I just felt that the clever title was a confusing way of saying 'usability trumps features'.

Furthermore, I'd suggest that the iPad is what makes GarageBand so usable and compelling an experience for audio newbies; it's not purely down to the software (although it's certainly excellent). My friend's kids love djay for iPad, for example, but they think my physical decks are 'lame'.

codingsewer 15 years ago | | |

I like the new focus on providing tools that do a simple task as simply as possible. Sometimes I do need the fine controls provided by complex UI's but most of the time I just need a tool I can hand to my technology-phobic mother-in-law so she can use it to shrink a 10 megapixel camera image down to something she can upload to a website with a 1mb upload limit.

gdevore 15 years ago | | |

Great example of what I am talking about.

gdevore 15 years ago | |

I don't think they are the same. We used to provide training for high-end medical devices. The manufacturers would often have a lot of features that looked good on a spec sheet but they were so complicated to use that no doctors ever actually used them.

Technically, they had the feature but the feature didn't help the doctors be better doctors. Features don't automatically translate to outcomes.

aksbhat 15 years ago | | |

You are comparing Garage Band to A High End Medical device?

    Technically, they had the feature but the feature didn't help the doctors be better doctors. Features don't automatically translate to outcomes.

How can you determine utility of a feature before it is built? Well the answer is you cant! And surely not for a High End Medical device!

In fact your whole argument is based on incorrect assumptions, well if you are building something like a GarageBand or one of the Me Too To Do list/Collaboration apps, go ahead sure do whatever you want. But when you are creating an EMR software or an MRI machine which costs Millions of dollars you better make sure that it has all types of features and customization capability.

The problem is that you are confident in your skills as a developer to predict the needs, While your hunch might be correct with software that is used in daily life, it might be totally wrong while making something that is not

Also "What people can do with your software" is a subset of "What software can do". Thus its the software that is the limiting case.

locopati 15 years ago | |

Nouns versus verbs. A big list of what isn't meaningful if the presentation is such that people can't use it effectively. Most folks just want to get the job done or be able to play around without being pulled away from playmind by a nitpicky interface. Even if all the desired features are present, a poor design can make the product unusable or frustrating.

jimsteinhart 15 years ago |

It’s not what people do. It's what your software does to people.

rexreed 15 years ago |

To paraphrase a philosophical statement: "If a Software Feature falls in a forest, and no one is around to use it, is it a Feature?"

ipfree 15 years ago |

RockBand is an example of successful application with minimal features. There are many failures that you newer hear about because they lock feature.