![]() Pocket already offered a dedicated bookmarking extension for Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Free users of Pocket (which some use to strip ads from online publications) are served with in-app sponsored content. The bookmarking service and apps are both available for free, although the service does monetize with a premium tier with advanced features for $4.99/month or $44.99/year. At the very least usability needs to be tested and customer response analyzed to make sure that you’re not barking up the wrong tree.Pocket, the popular read-it-later bookmarking service, has been acquired by Firefox developer Mozilla, according to Recode. Pocket has client apps on Android and Chrome including a browser extension. But it is also the road to ruin by hubris. Using one’s own tastes and desires as a way to develop the user experience and feature list is a fine way to go if you’ve got good taste. It’s all well and good to preach the gospel of simplicity but there are good reasons for simpler apps and good reasons for more complex apps (sometimes if only to sell upgrades). The core functionality is simple and easy to use and the application is stable and relatively fast. It is a web browser, by design it has to support lots of different web technologies, otherwise it is not very useful. I don’t know how anyone can sit and call Firefox mediocre. For the overwhelming majority of Word users they could get by on using the features from Word 97 but the problem for MS is that if they left Word alone in 1997 they wouldn’t have made much more money from it. In my opinion, Word has the massive mountain of features in order to justify charging people for upgrades. Word definitely is more complex than it needs to be, but there’s a reason for that. Being everything to everyone incurs huge costs in complexity, reliability, and efficiency that I can’t afford, that I can’t tolerate in products I use, and that can’t result in a product I can be proud of.Ĭlearly one should not blindly implement every feature users ask for. They both try to be everything to everyone, and they’ve largely achieved that, hence their success.īut, like most independent or small developers, I have neither the resources nor the desire to be everything to everyone, and I don’t like the experience of using most products that were designed in that way. I can’t argue that Microsoft Word or Firefox haven’t been successful, and I won’t argue that they don’t deserve their success. A lot of mediocre products are extremely successful, and a lot of extremely successful products are mediocre. Success, as measured by installed base or revenue, doesn’t strongly corrolate to quality. Pies: My goal in this was to discuss quality and how I prioritize features and feedback. In many ways, Instapaper today is even simpler than its 2008 versions. It’s difficult to add useful features without adding complexity, but it can be done. Since then, I hope I’ve demonstrated continued restraint despite the product’s (and service’s) growth. I bet it will fail.”Ĭhristian: Instapaper has been on the iPhone since a few days after the App Store launched in 2008. Here he evaluates the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product: On a related note, “Feature checklist dysfunction” is another post by Marco where he rails against checklist comparisons. And I can vouch personally for the results: Instapaper is the iPhone app I use the most. ![]() ![]() Great to hear about Marco’s strong point of view. I try to minimize ways for my customers to shoot themselves in the foot…If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter. That means a big NO to the following: unread-count icon badge, tags, full-screen reading (where you tap to temporarily show the toolbars), comments, and Graphical Mode (“It’s one of those features that people say they want until they actually use it and realize that it’s not worthwhile at all.”)ĭoes this mean he’s not listening to customers? No, he’s just not letting them steer the product. ![]() In it, Marco talks about how features only get developed if he wants to use them. “Side effects of developing for yourself” is an interesting piece by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper (a simple tool to save web pages for reading later). ![]()
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