Fergus Dyer-Smith

Here is a really neat idea I picked up off Mike Sikorsky over in Canada when I was there. It’s real simple but as often is with simple ideas…really effective

Essentially it describes a way to test the usefulness of your own feature ideas.

Given this typical scenario.

You spot some issue with your online app.
You decide that what’s needed is a new feature
You ask your users if it would prove useful.
They think it would.
So you build it. Launch it.. and..
No one uses it…and you’ve just spent hours creating more clutter!

Brilliant

So here is a really low impact way to check whether a feature will really be appreciated. The results are a good deal more telling than asking a community directly.

1. Create a link to your new feature, (Mike used the example of testing to see if a certain video was required by just producing an image of the video player)
2. Send the link to a 404 page, server busy or the way we do it with “Like to See” question
3. Track the number of click throughs
4. If no-one clicks then don’t build…simple…time cheap but really effective

We’ve used it loads recently for lots of small potential features and has saved us a ton of time