Apr 03 2008 at 9:44am
If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?
At work I take care of a couple of web apps that were developed by the guy who had my job before me. Most were built to address particular needs raised by others in the office. The thing is that they got bit creative with the functionality in some areas. For example, we have this events calendar that includes personal profiles that can pull in events from Facebook and Upcoming.org profiles. It’s a cool feature – users can use this system to consolidate their University and personal events. Seems like a neat idea.
The problem is that nobody uses it. I took a look in the database the other day and there are only about 11 facebook keys and none for upcoming.org (not counting the devs). Granted, the functionality isn’t particularly obvious and is not explained to the user all that well either. There’s also a feature that can send reminders to you by email or sms. That’s only been used about 12 times so far this year.
That brings me to the question raised in the title: If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?
