More features?...
or better features?

It is always difficult to decide where to focus engineering efforts for product upgrades. Will the product be more successful if it has more features, or should the existing features be improved?

Don’t try to answer this question alone. You have help right at your fingertips, even if you didn’t know it: your users.

Many of today’s products save your users’ “footprints” as they interact with your product’s features. These footprints help you to weigh decisions such as whether to add new features or improve existing features.

What might surprise you is that most of the time the answer is…better features. In fact, we found that it is better to remove unused features than to add new features. To get the best performance, however, you need to improve your key features to make them more valuable for your consumers.

Authors Paul Allen Smethers and Alastair France analyzed billions of transactions from millions of real consumers to find the answers to this and other tough questions. Their top-selling book, Five Myths of Consumer Behavior, helps explain why some products or features succeed while others don’t.

Five Myths of Consumer Behavior is a valuable tool for entrepreneurs, marketers, and engineers trying to crack the consumer technology marketplace. It retails for $14.95, and you can pick it up at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or Borders book stores.

What others say:

The methodology for consumer adoption proposed here has definitely helped us drive service usage and market penetration for Vodafone live!

—Csaba Tarnai, Milan, County Manager Vodafone live!

Read this? I devoured it in two days (interrupted only by the need to sleep). Very specific, but incredibly relevant to anyone creating tech products, like we do at Airborne. Written in a breezy, accessible style (despite its subject matter), the authors’ melding of the standard product S-curve and a broken-up consumer adoption funnel is pure genius. What a find!

—Andy Nulman, President and CMO Airborne Entertainment

It’s been required reading at the office and for good reason. It’s a superb book! Something every marketing student and product designer or engineer should pick up. At only 147 big-print pages it’s a rather quick read but it packs a big punch and does a fine job at outlining core yet often overlooked consumer behaviour principles. In particular, Smethers articulately explains (in plain English) the various phases and stalling points of new product adoption, the barriers to initial use and proper usability, the different types of users and how to approach them, the many costs to the consumer and why it’s so important to highlight a product’s true value.

—The Creative Generalist

Sample Myth:

Myth 5: Consumers want more features

The problem: As an idea turns into a product and starts shipping, its designers and engineers seem to have an unlimited number of new ideas for new features to include in the next version, each feature designed to make the product “more complete.” However, in the eyes of the consumer, the exact opposite is happening. The early users are wondering why the key feature is so hard to use, buggy, or incomplete.

The reality:

Consumers only want a few key features, and they want them to work well.

The Consumer Behavior Bubble Chart enables comparisons of different features or services to determine how many consumers use each feature (Attraction), how much time consumers spend with each feature (Usage), and how often they return to use the feature again in the future (Stickiness).

The solution: Before shipping a product, all you have is your professional training and experience to aid you in designing a product. But once you have built and shipped the product, you have access to a wealth of consumer usage information that can help drive future design decisions. Use this data to tell you where your value really is and focus on continuously improving that value.

Where to buy:

The easiest way to purchase Five Myths of Consumer Behavior is to go to Amazon.com and purchase it online. The retail price is US$14.95.

Barnes & Noble and Borders also carry Five Myths of Consumer Behavior in most of their retail bookstores. Please call your store in advance to make sure it has the book in stock.