[HN Gopher] Respect Your Power Users
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Respect Your Power Users
Author : simonpure
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-01-31 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's very hard to make an app that is usable by both casual and
| power users. So some companies have taken the approach of just
| appealing to the larger of the two userbases, the casual users,
| and trying to scale out as much as possible.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Re: Google Reader--I think part of this might be generational.
| Your average Googler (even 7 years ago) is basically a latecomer
| to the Internet and values different things. They were barely
| alive during the heydays of the decentralized web, IRC,
| newsgroups, P2P file-sharing, RSS, etc. In a company where
| developers have a lot of power, the old hats standing up for
| "outdated" tools and software are simply outnumbered.
|
| Anecdotally, I've noticed Zoomers are less inclined to be power
| users themselves. If true, I blame software monocultures and
| pseudo-computing (phones).
| swiley wrote:
| I've met zoomer power users. You can find them on widgetsmith
| and Discord. Apple seems to be undoing some of their stupidity
| on the iPhone lately with eg shortuts/widgets/iSH. The cynist
| in me says it's just to blunt the coming lawsuits though.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I train college students as part of my job, and there are
| definitely some power users, but I am generalizing.
|
| What I am thinking of is, someone who was a programmer ~20
| years ago would probably have a lot of *NIX, IT, and
| networking skills that you could take for granted, whereas
| today there are coders from many different backgrounds (which
| isn't necessarily bad).
|
| I've met a surprising number of 20-year-olds who spend their
| entire day in Visual Studio Code and don't know that Home/End
| go to the beginning and end of the line. Or they don't know
| how DNS works. Just two examples off the top of my head.
| p_l wrote:
| When it comes to home/end, that might be because a lot of
| the computers they interact with simply don't have those
| keys, or they are on Mac and the keys go to start/end of
| document, etc etc.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I think pseudo computing is a good way to describe phones. This
| is probably natural though; it was arrogant to think that the
| coming of the PC would make everyone into hackers any more than
| the wide availability of hammers has made everyone into a
| carpenter.
| prox wrote:
| Another shout out if you're interested in this topic is About
| Face : the essentials of interaction design. It's the bible on
| this topic for me : from planning to production, it covers all
| ways your product (app, embedded, etc.) will interact with the
| user.
| tyingq wrote:
| Looking at you, outlook.com. Why can't I see headers on sent
| messages?
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| I would also add that there are a few different types of power
| users. Two off the top of my head are "very active users" and
| "very technical users".
|
| The foremost often can be maintainers of communities. Example:
| Reddit or Discord. These same communities might end up being the
| main part of your product. Other examples include social media
| like Youtube, or even Instagram.
|
| To these users a different set of power tools are needed, than
| for the "technical power users" who need different kinds of power
| tools.
|
| For the "very active users", you might want to be able to provide
| things like UI customization, social media linking, statistics
| and easy tools for moderation.
|
| Examples of tools for "technical power users" might be providing
| a large set of actions that can be custom-key-bound. A
| macro/scripting API. An alternate API to your service completely
| (REST-ful), or support for modding. You can guess what those
| tools will later be used for quite simply I'm sure. :)
| eatonphil wrote:
| This is a very common idea among technical users. But I'd love to
| see it backed up by broader research into a theory of product
| design that works for users in a way that is good for the
| business.
|
| Most of the time these posts are just rants, which might be true,
| but may not provide a sufficiently compelling/research-driven
| case for product managers.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| The article doesn't directly mention this point, but my opinion
| is you need to take care of your power users since they tend to
| be influencers in their own circles. Often they're the tech-savvy
| member of the family/friendship/work colleague circle, and they
| steer other non-power users to their preferred products, which
| over time gain popularity. Signal is a great example of this.
|
| Please look after your power users! Maintaining their trust is
| critical.
| csydas wrote:
| The so called power users, like any other, have many facets.
| Sometimes they're quite cooperative and indeed, they push edge
| cases that other users simply don't, advance powerful workflows
| using your tooling you never thought of, etc.
|
| But they can also be down-right arrogant and self-centered ;)
|
| I think the scale of influence the article is talking about is
| bigger than personal circles and is focusing more on huge user
| bases. The power users I deal with daily are a mixed bunch;
| some are very earnest in their pursuit of using our product to
| its fullest extent, which is great; they open themselves up to
| risk by pushing new features their limits, and we're willing to
| work with them as they continue to invest further into us. This
| is great because in this scenario we have the same end goals,
| so it works out and it's a good investment for everyone
| involved.
|
| For some power users though, as soon as our goals deviate and
| we're no longer looking in the same direction for a given
| feature/product, it's like a really bad break up, and quite a
| few do not like to take it silently or easily. I have some that
| have been threatening to leave the product for 3+ years because
| we've elected not to invest resources further into a specific
| feature (low demand, market is turning away from this feature,
| the investment is simply too great at this point to justify the
| cost). But they never leave, for reasons I'm not going to
| speculate on.
|
| The way that our power users act regarding such decisions is
| frankly borderline harassment at times; spamming forum posts,
| harassing our support team with endless cases just to complain
| about a feature they know we don't have, it can eat up a lot of
| time. The power users insist they are right, and that our
| decision is 'a huge mistake we just don't understand', and they
| continue to remind us of this -- it's hard to not consider the
| attitudes arrogant, and the language used to describe
| themselves feels a bit too self-congratulatory.
|
| Frankly speaking I don't like the tone of the article even if I
| agree with some of its points as it sounds too much like the
| bad users mentioned above.
|
| So as with all things, it's best with moderation and constant
| doses of reality. Without these checks, it's easy to get a very
| bad relationship set up and such relationships take a lot to
| advance to a more stable position.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| > because we've elected not to invest resources further into
| a specific feature (low demand, market is turning away from
| this feature, the investment is simply too great at this
| point to justify the cost)
|
| Just curious, what happens if you tell them why you've chosen
| not to invest in the feature they want?
| csydas wrote:
| What makes you think we don't? :)
|
| We try to be very transparent about whether or not
| something's on the roadmap, or why it's not when it's not.
|
| The point I was trying to make is that often, the power
| users don't take it very well at all. Most of the time it's
| just disappointment, but we will often get a variety of
| flawed arguments in response to our reasoning, which I get
| is just frustration that they aren't getting their request.
|
| Edit for further comments:
|
| If you're honestly curious on the array of responses,
| usually it's just continual expressions of disappointment
| that we aren't.
|
| Some of the more adamant users will do one or more of the
| following:
|
| - insist our data is wrong
|
| - insist our prediction is wrong
|
| - insist the market is wrong
|
| - demand the feature anyways
|
| - insist it's not that much of a development time sink
|
| - ignore all the reasons and just post complaints
|
| and of course much more.
|
| It's normal, of course, and it does tend to be a smaller
| subset of users, but there are enough that they keep me
| busy week in and out.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| > What makes you think we don't? :)
|
| I assumed you did, I've just never been responsible for
| responding to customers so I was curious about what power
| users say.
|
| I wonder if a solution is to let them add their feature
| to your software (like browser addons)? Of course, this
| doesn't work for all kinds of software, and maintaining
| the addon API would be added work, but it might appease
| power users.
| csydas wrote:
| yeah, I realized I maybe misread your statement, so
| that's why I edited it.
|
| >I wonder if a solution is to let them add their feature
| to your software (like browser addons)?
|
| In fact we have a powershell integration and RESTAPI they
| can develop on. But the simple fact is that a lot of
| these users don't want it, they want it baked into the
| product core functionality since we don't personally
| support such custom projects. We offer that we will
| validate that all the endpoints work correctly, but
| that's it, and for medium larger businesses, this
| typically is a "no go". It's either baked in feature, or
| it's not a feature.
|
| Even for the smaller "power users", most of the time they
| don't want to take the time to develop the functionality
| themselves (which I get, it's time consuming to develop).
| But the option is there, just not utilized.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| We had a weird ultra-fan at a storage startup where I worked
| in the 2000s. He used to call in and berate techs for hours.
| It was a small support team so everybody knew him. Once I had
| to jump on a line with a new hire he was absolutely tearing
| up, inform the customer he was being unprofessionally
| abusive, and end the call--the only time I've ever had to do
| that in my career. And yet when we corrupted his data
| (terrible terrible C code), he actually went to bat for us
| with his management and ended up buying even more.
|
| Finally one of our field techs met him in person. Turns out
| the guy was 700+ pounds (300+ kg) and just absolutely
| miserable. He was as hated at his own job as he was at our
| office. Somehow he saw us as his surrogate family and I guess
| decided to treat us the way he'd been treated. Really a sad
| case overall. I often wonder what ended up happening to him
| after our company folded.
|
| There are some strange, strange people out there. Coddle them
| at your peril.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I think this is an underrated aspect of the enormous success of
| early OS X with technical people.
|
| Before, the Mac was a big deal in graphics and other areas like
| that, but didn't really have an inroad to people who wanted to
| code. Shifting to OSX created a platform with all the power of
| Linux under the hood, but with access to the COTS tools that
| many people prefer/need.
|
| I was part of this. In the early 21st century, I was doing lots
| of LAMP stack work, and you could just install everything
| locally on your Mac, build and test locally, and then rsync up
| to the test server for broader evaluation. I think this was
| partly inadvertent, but Apple doesn't do anything accidentally.
|
| So all of a sudden, you'd go to tech confs for things like Ruby
| or Python, and see a roomful of glowing Apple logos. Because
| deliberately or not, the platform respected the power user.
|
| People are upset now b/c they fear the iOS-ification of what we
| now call MacOS. I'm not convinced it's happening in any
| meaningful sense (I can still build and run whatever I want),
| but it's probably worth _watching_. Any move away from the
| "perfect hybrid" that OSX was in, say, 2002, is
| scary/unwelcome, even if the moves are things that are probably
| good ideas for normal people, and easily circumvented for power
| users (like a default restriction to signed code).
| cperciva wrote:
| _Shifting to OSX created a platform with all the power of
| Linux under the hood_
|
| Even better: It had all the power of BSD under the hood.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| I just wanted to say, IMO, "nailed it." This is why I moved
| to Mac OS X in 2004, and why I began de-Appling my life in
| 2019 (for WSL). Too many anti-features across all Apple
| hardware and software, not to mention killing good software
| like Aperture.
| gear54rus wrote:
| There is also a counterpoint: power users are typically smarter
| and therefore less likely to be affected by your marketing BS
| and therefore harder to extract money from. So retaining them
| is not worth the effort.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| That may be true, but someone has to develop the apps for
| your platform. Developers, tech bloggers, reviewers,
| streamers are often power users and influence a lot of
| consumers.
|
| And maybe they don't care about Apple spending 30 minutes to
| brag about how their Macbook just got 0.2mm thinner. But they
| might still consider the purchase if it doesn't come with a
| touchbar and another broken keyboard.
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