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Forums > All Catalyze > Design
Subject: Featuritis and Customer Experience
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thumbarger
Posts:156
12/03/2007 1:45 PM Alert 

I ran across this picture of the Featuritis Curve (from Kathy Sierra) in a blog post by Pete Abilla and thought it would be interesting to see how others define the intersection of customer happiness and features.

The bottom line is that "People remember experiences. They don’t remember attributes or benefits or features."  

You can read more about the curve in Pete's blog entry.

How do you determine the intersection of user happiness and features?
scottm
Posts:8
12/04/2007 1:24 PM Alert 
Tom,

Great article, this sparked a whole discussion here at OneSpring as to where the root cause of Featuritis occurs and the outcome was this. Marketing departments request to have more and more features to out sell their competitors and Product Managers often do not have the power to push back, thus we end up with products like MS Word with 387 features that nobody ever uses. This is why I love the guys over at 37Signals they produce just the right amount of features to value, Apple is another company that understands the Featuritis Curve. I'm curious to hear others viewpoint on where Featuritius starts.
ssaldanha
Posts:7
12/07/2007 2:58 PM Alert 
I think part of where Featuritis begins is also with the stakeholders. When you are working with stakeholders that cover different functions and have different needs you end up with a really long list of "NEEDED" features. It is up to the BA to figure out exactly what is the NEED vs. WANT (since the stakeholders may not be able to make the differentiation), however, sometimes it is only until the application is implemented that we see what functionality is being used.

On another note, how do you think user skill set fits into the Featuritis diagram? I think the aptitude of a user impacts User Happiness because while the application may be great for a person that loves technology, that same application may be at the level of "I Suck!" for someone who works completely paper-based.