<story><title>Goodbye Basecamp, This Is The End</title><url>http://www.christianjung.com/2011/goodbye-basecamp-this-is-the-end-of-a-true-love-my-heart-is-broken/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giberson</author><text>I wonder if there is room for a product that grows with you?&lt;p&gt;What if there were a product that is exposed to you first in the simplest form. It&apos;s clean, elegant and simple. Easy and not intimidating to use.&lt;p&gt;As you use the product, your needs begin to increase and suddenly you need a new feature. As it turns out, the product actually supports this feature and so you turn it on. Now, you are turning on feature X, not feature package premium--just feature X.&lt;p&gt;In fact, the product actually has several additional features and functionality that can be enabled and disabled one at a time. None of these &quot;extra&quot; features cost &quot;extra&quot;. They are all included in the base price of the package.&lt;p&gt;What if your product has a training module, where users can be guided through test use case scenarios that expose and demonstrate new feature modules. And what if we make it so that when you enable a new feature on the product, that feature only shows up to users who have completed the training guide for the new feature in the module.&lt;p&gt;In other words, in order for any specific extra feature to show up it needs to be:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    1) Turned on by the administrator.
    2) Flagged as &quot;trained&quot; on a per agent basis.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This way the base product has easy accessibility and additional features can be exposed gradually not taking effect for an agent until they have gone through the training to learn how to use it.</text></item><item><author>spolsky</author><text>The 37signals ethos of having an opinion and saying no a lot creates wonderful experiences and products for users who are new to a certain field. For someone who is new to project management, for example, the fancy programs with every feature and option are confusing and scary. Products like Basecamp are beautiful for these users.&lt;p&gt;As users gain more experience, their needs become slightly more complex. They start to understand the simple product completely, and then they have the cognitive ability to understand more fancy bells &apos;n&apos; whistles. For users who have been doing project management for a long time with any software product, they will have a long list of things that they know -- from experience! -- that they need.&lt;p&gt;That is why there&apos;s a market for simple and there&apos;s a market for full-featured. Both are discrete markets, usually. Obviously every software designer strives for &quot;power made easy&quot; -- it seems easy at first, but there is power under the hood when you need it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edw</author><text>I&apos;m going to go ahead and answer your question: I don&apos;t know if there&apos;s room for a product that grows with you, but I don&apos;t think such products are feasible.&lt;p&gt;I worked with a large personal finance software company at a time when they were enraptured with re-use. They had visions of doing things like sharing contact and project management modules across customer relationship management (CRM) and invoicing applications. I had a large stake in making sure they thought through these issues clearly, as the very form of the product I was leading the creation of was at stake.&lt;p&gt;We think about an invoice or a project or a task or a contact as something that&apos;s fairly self-evident, but they&apos;re not. More precisely, an application needs to create a model of these things, and that model is a useful simplification.&lt;p&gt;It is likely that &quot;a product that grows with you&quot; is one that fundamentally changes the model of the entities that your product works with. So, for example, a simple invoicing tool might have a client or a customer field, and that works in let&apos;s say ninety-five percent of the cases, but for some people, they want a full-on contact manager where you need to know that an invoice is for ABC Co., that the client contact is John Smith, that invoices should be sent to payables@abcco.example.com. Pretty soon you&apos;re going down the contact management slash engagement business process analysis rabbit hole.&lt;p&gt;And going down that rabbit hole is fine, but you&apos;re never going to be able to create 1. a simple, novice-friendly view of that industrial strength application that 2. stores data in a way that is semantically correct so that 3. when the user decides to upgrade from Invoicr Lite to Invoicr Enterprise Platinum their data isn&apos;t a nightmarish state.&lt;p&gt;This is one of the reasons why it took Windows user experience so long to approach anything even remotely as pleasant as the Mac: Windows had to support a much — let us say out of politeness — richer model computing than the Mac did. The Mac user was never exposed to certain details — like whether your filesystem was &quot;really&quot; hierarchical (the original Mac didn&apos;t have this feature) — but instead shown a simplified view of the world that Apple and developers had the freedom (and obligation) to implement by any means necessary.</text></comment>
<story><title>Goodbye Basecamp, This Is The End</title><url>http://www.christianjung.com/2011/goodbye-basecamp-this-is-the-end-of-a-true-love-my-heart-is-broken/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giberson</author><text>I wonder if there is room for a product that grows with you?&lt;p&gt;What if there were a product that is exposed to you first in the simplest form. It&apos;s clean, elegant and simple. Easy and not intimidating to use.&lt;p&gt;As you use the product, your needs begin to increase and suddenly you need a new feature. As it turns out, the product actually supports this feature and so you turn it on. Now, you are turning on feature X, not feature package premium--just feature X.&lt;p&gt;In fact, the product actually has several additional features and functionality that can be enabled and disabled one at a time. None of these &quot;extra&quot; features cost &quot;extra&quot;. They are all included in the base price of the package.&lt;p&gt;What if your product has a training module, where users can be guided through test use case scenarios that expose and demonstrate new feature modules. And what if we make it so that when you enable a new feature on the product, that feature only shows up to users who have completed the training guide for the new feature in the module.&lt;p&gt;In other words, in order for any specific extra feature to show up it needs to be:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    1) Turned on by the administrator.
    2) Flagged as &quot;trained&quot; on a per agent basis.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This way the base product has easy accessibility and additional features can be exposed gradually not taking effect for an agent until they have gone through the training to learn how to use it.</text></item><item><author>spolsky</author><text>The 37signals ethos of having an opinion and saying no a lot creates wonderful experiences and products for users who are new to a certain field. For someone who is new to project management, for example, the fancy programs with every feature and option are confusing and scary. Products like Basecamp are beautiful for these users.&lt;p&gt;As users gain more experience, their needs become slightly more complex. They start to understand the simple product completely, and then they have the cognitive ability to understand more fancy bells &apos;n&apos; whistles. For users who have been doing project management for a long time with any software product, they will have a long list of things that they know -- from experience! -- that they need.&lt;p&gt;That is why there&apos;s a market for simple and there&apos;s a market for full-featured. Both are discrete markets, usually. Obviously every software designer strives for &quot;power made easy&quot; -- it seems easy at first, but there is power under the hood when you need it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbwyme</author><text>I think you are on track for an interesting idea but forcing training is certainly not the way to do it. I hate doing training in any software. UI/UX is all about keeping things intuitive/similar so new users pick it up with ease so there is no training required. Training is a buzz kill.&lt;p&gt;However, I think a piece of software that evolves is what most people intend when they start with a minimum viable product. What you don&apos;t see too often are benchmarks to &quot;grade&quot; users and automatically move them up to more advanced features. I&apos;d have to think more about it to see how it could be implemented and how beneficial it would be but I think its interesting none the less. It would be similar to a game in which you &quot;unlock&quot; certain maps/levels/etc.</text></comment>