The new 9rules Ali is only 5 days old and already a slew of feature requests have been coming our way. What have I learned during these five days that I already knew before, but never experienced myself? Everybody wants everything done their way. This isn’t a bad thing because we all know how to make the experience better for us, but most of the time one man’s solution becomes another man’s problem.
The tricky part we are finding about feature requests is that while all of them may sound good, not all of them are really practical or needed. For example, some people have requested that we integrate GMail into my.9rules and while the idea seems kind of cool there is really nothing practical about it. We are finding that with the infrastructure that we have put in place we can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean we should do all of those things.
Is it a bad thing that everyone wants the site to do everything? Of course not because that shows they have an interest in it instead of looking and turning away. The hope is that if you do implement a feature request it helps increase the experience of all the users in the system and not just the ones that requested it.
An even bigger problem is when the creators of the system want the system to do everything. We do get ahead of ourselves sometimes, but who doesn’t? As of now though we are focused on tightening up the user’s experience on the site and features can come down the road.
Originally posted on February 12, 2007 @ 6:26 am