Software for Humans

I wrote previously about the benefits of experimentation in web application design. Such experiments will reveal conclusively whether or not a new feature, UI change, etc, will help your users or hinder them. But experiments will not tell you what new features you should consider implementing or what parts of the UI need streamlining in the first place. How can you figure out what comes next in your product development roadmap?

Most importantly, you need to know your users. They don't use your application because it is pretty; they use it to accomplish tasks. What are the tasks? As an application developer you might think you know, but your users might surprise you. I never would have expected that one of the tasks our blog admins need to accomplish with our software was to figure out who has won their blogging contest.

Looking at the list of tasks, which ones do your users find to be frustrating? If your application includes page analytics you can get an idea by watching which task workflows have the greatest abandonment rate. Your support staff may have hard data regarding the parts of your application that generate the most support calls. Don't only rely on their hunches, though; get the metrics.