<story><title>Trello co-founder Michael Pryor on pandering to power users</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/30/trello_pryor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alex_c</author><text>&amp;gt;But the number of your customers who want unbounded complexity is very, very low.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s worth making a distinction here between &lt;i&gt;complexity&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;flexibility&lt;/i&gt;, which I think some designers &amp;#x2F; product managers fail to grasp.&lt;p&gt;Users don&amp;#x27;t want complexity, but they do want flexibility, especially from tools they use all the time.  It&amp;#x27;s a hard balance to make products that are simple &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; flexible, but the products that pull it off tend to rule the world.  The humble spreadsheet software is the ultimate example.&lt;p&gt;For example: adding more whitespace and limiting the number of fields on a screen will reduce complexity for users, but it may also reduce flexibility and end up as a net negative. (looking at you FreshBooks, I&amp;#x27;m still angry about that redesign a few years back!)</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>The comment about power users:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Pryor reckons one pain point is visibility into the increasingly busy Trello boards put together by customers, but the team is cautious about sacrificing usability on the altar of feature requests.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Developers,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;add more stuff, add more stuff, add more stuff... and, essentially, you get this tool that does more things for those specific power users. But in the beginning, those people that were using it, you&amp;#x27;ve now turned those people off, and they&amp;#x27;re not coming in anymore, because now the software is too complicated to use.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t fully understand this as a developer, but it become crystal clear as a product manager. I personally love power tools with countless knobs to adjust, command line options to explore, complex features to learn, and other fun things that stimulate the mind of an engineer.&lt;p&gt;But the number of your customers who want unbounded complexity is very, very low. Some of the most vocal customers might mislead you on this fact by demanding some specific feature for their workload and recruiting armies of commenters to back them up. Letting the loudest customers dictate your product roadmap will start to alienate the silent majority of your users.&lt;p&gt;Offering plug-in functionality, a scripting system, or a documented API is a nice way to cater to power users without cluttering up the UX&amp;#x2F;UI. However, that brings up a real problem with the power users who think they know more than they do, who end up destroying their data through the API and trying to have customer support fix it or otherwise hold the company accountable. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re simply better off letting the 1% of power users feeling disappointed while you focus on a product for the 99% of users who just want your core functionality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bigbubba</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Users don&amp;#x27;t want complexity, but they do want flexibility&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think Alan Kay said it best: Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.&lt;p&gt;Excel is an example of software not meant for programmers that exemplifies this principle.  Doing simple things in a spread sheet is simple, it doesn&amp;#x27;t take more than a few minutes to learn how to sum up some columns and manage a simple budget in a spreadsheet, but there is still a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of room for power users to stretch their muscles.  (Whether or not some excel power users would be better off hiring a programmer is another matter, but excel has doubtlessly empowered millions of non-programmers regardless.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Trello co-founder Michael Pryor on pandering to power users</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/30/trello_pryor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alex_c</author><text>&amp;gt;But the number of your customers who want unbounded complexity is very, very low.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s worth making a distinction here between &lt;i&gt;complexity&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;flexibility&lt;/i&gt;, which I think some designers &amp;#x2F; product managers fail to grasp.&lt;p&gt;Users don&amp;#x27;t want complexity, but they do want flexibility, especially from tools they use all the time.  It&amp;#x27;s a hard balance to make products that are simple &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; flexible, but the products that pull it off tend to rule the world.  The humble spreadsheet software is the ultimate example.&lt;p&gt;For example: adding more whitespace and limiting the number of fields on a screen will reduce complexity for users, but it may also reduce flexibility and end up as a net negative. (looking at you FreshBooks, I&amp;#x27;m still angry about that redesign a few years back!)</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>The comment about power users:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Pryor reckons one pain point is visibility into the increasingly busy Trello boards put together by customers, but the team is cautious about sacrificing usability on the altar of feature requests.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Developers,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;add more stuff, add more stuff, add more stuff... and, essentially, you get this tool that does more things for those specific power users. But in the beginning, those people that were using it, you&amp;#x27;ve now turned those people off, and they&amp;#x27;re not coming in anymore, because now the software is too complicated to use.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t fully understand this as a developer, but it become crystal clear as a product manager. I personally love power tools with countless knobs to adjust, command line options to explore, complex features to learn, and other fun things that stimulate the mind of an engineer.&lt;p&gt;But the number of your customers who want unbounded complexity is very, very low. Some of the most vocal customers might mislead you on this fact by demanding some specific feature for their workload and recruiting armies of commenters to back them up. Letting the loudest customers dictate your product roadmap will start to alienate the silent majority of your users.&lt;p&gt;Offering plug-in functionality, a scripting system, or a documented API is a nice way to cater to power users without cluttering up the UX&amp;#x2F;UI. However, that brings up a real problem with the power users who think they know more than they do, who end up destroying their data through the API and trying to have customer support fix it or otherwise hold the company accountable. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re simply better off letting the 1% of power users feeling disappointed while you focus on a product for the 99% of users who just want your core functionality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>addicted</author><text>I feel like UNIX tools do this very well.&lt;p&gt;Setting aside the random naming and inconsistent argument placing, most UNIX CLI tools have sensible default behavior.&lt;p&gt;But you can man the tool and find a whole bunch of switches etc that offer up a lot of complexity.&lt;p&gt;The piping system similarly is brilliant. It’s a simple and easy way to make extremely complex workflows using simple tools, but you could spend your entire life never knowing about piping and still do just fine with the individual tools.</text></comment>