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?

What do users really want?

They probably don’t know themselves. You have to anticipate their needs, but you also need to be realistic about it. There are two questions we could start with here:

• Wouldn’t it be cool if …?
• What would the users want to do with this?

I think you really have to start with the latter and try to ignore your own concepts of "coolness". Having a useful application isn’t about using the latest and greatest api’s or ajax or any of that sort of thing. It’s about making you app useful to the users.

That’s what’s cool. Start with satisfying a need, then find the right way to implement it. If the right way is using old fashioned methods, then what’s wrong with that? On the other hand, maybe using ajax or mash-ups is the best way to implement things.

Don’t the students like ‘cool’ stuff?

You’d think, right? All those young kids these days, they’re really into Facebook and all those Web 2 sites, they must love that sort of thing. Well, it turns out that they don’t necessarily. One thing I’ve heard over and over again from students is that it has to be useful. They won’t read anything if they don’t think it’s useful. It stands to reason, then, that they won’t use anything if they don’t think it’s useful.

Nielsen’s report on usability for teens talks about how "Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. " While they do use technology a lot they’re not necessarily as astute as we might assume them to be.

Another thing Nielsen points out there is that we can’t assume that users – even young people – are as technically aware as we are:

First, most people in charge of websites are at the extreme high end of the brainpower/techno-enthusiasm curve. These people are highly educated and very smart early adopters, and they spend a lot of time online. Most of the teens they know share these characteristics. Rarely do people in the top 5 percent spend any significant time with the 80 percent of the population who constitute the mainstream audience.

I think this is very true in the academic environment. There are always a small number of early adopters, people who are interested in finding technical solutions to their problems. Maybe the key in developing applications is building the tools that even the non-technical majority will use.

Remember ‘eye candy’?

In the 90′s, web designers would do all kinds of strange things to their web pages to make them look more interesting to visitors. Animated gif’s, shimmering java applet ponds, 3D "interface" graphics – it was ghastly! We soon learned that it was just “eye candy”. Visually interesting but nutritionally empty. These "cool features" are no different. Conceptually interesting but practically not that useful.

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