Simon’s Blog

Today, I had the pleasure of visiting a great group of developers who wanted some feedback on a project they’ve been working on for the last few years. They’re now getting ready for a public release of some of their systems, with everything due to go live towards the middle of the year. The date on which they must be ready to ship isn’t in the hands of the team, and so they don’t have the luxury of shipping their product when it’s perfect.

My advice on shipping software to a deadline, for what it’s worth, can be summarised in just a few key points:

1. Make Sure Your Software Works - Users Are Once Bitten, Twice Shy People can be quite unforgiving when it comes to using new software. If your system doesn’t work properly or provides no tangible benefts the first time someone tries it out, chances are that you’ve lost that user forever. They’ll never look at that piece of software again. Innovators and early adopters are more forgiving, but even then it doesn’t pay to test people’s patience too much.

2. Don’t Be Afraid To Cut Features There may be competitor products that do more than version 1.0 of your software. In the early days, you don’t have to compete on features - just make sure that whatever your software does, it does it well. Better that your software does one useful thing really well, than several things in a mediocre way. If you’re working to a deadline for shipping, don’t be afraid to simply cut out any features that aren”t great. While you will know there is a whole bunch of features missing, your users will never know those features were there in the first place; so they won’t know they were cut.

3. Put Enough Investment Into Your User Interface If your software is even remotely sophisticated, there will be plenty on going behind the scenes. You might have a huge database, with all sorts of fancy stuff happening on your servers. But, your users won’t see any of that: they won’t know how great your server-side software is; and they won’t care either. Most people will judge your software, in large part, on its user interface. So, make sure the user interface to your sofware isn’t an after-thought - it’s probably the most important part of your system. Ideally, the user interface needs to be : easy to learn; easy to use; and to look great. If you get the user interface right, most people will assume that you’ve got everything else in the system right too.

What this all boils down to is that first impressions really count when it comes to software. The same is true of web-sites. In fact, the latest research suggests that most users make up their minds about the quality of a web-site in around 0.2 seconds. So, you literally have the blink of an eye to get someone’s attention…