Trello co-founder Michael Pryor on pandering to power users
The comment about power users:<p>> Pryor reckons one pain point is visibility into the increasingly busy Trello boards put together by customers, but the team is cautious about sacrificing usability on the altar of feature requests.<p>> "Developers," he said, "add more stuff, add more stuff, add more stuff... and, essentially, you get this tool that does more things for those specific power users. But in the beginning, those people that were using it, you've now turned those people off, and they're not coming in anymore, because now the software is too complicated to use."<p>I didn’t fully understand this as a developer, but it become crystal clear as a product manager. I personally love power tools with countless knobs to adjust, command line options to explore, complex features to learn, and other fun things that stimulate the mind of an engineer.<p>But the number of your customers who want unbounded complexity is very, very low. Some of the most vocal customers might mislead you on this fact by demanding some specific feature for their workload and recruiting armies of commenters to back them up. Letting the loudest customers dictate your product roadmap will start to alienate the silent majority of your users.<p>Offering plug-in functionality, a scripting system, or a documented API is a nice way to cater to power users without cluttering up the UX/UI. However, that brings up a real problem with the power users who think they know more than they do, who end up destroying their data through the API and trying to have customer support fix it or otherwise hold the company accountable. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re simply better off letting the 1% of power users feeling disappointed while you focus on a product for the 99% of users who just want your core functionality.