Decisions by community, not by committee
Posted by Sundar Subramanian on Sat, Dec 09, 2006 @ 07:48 AM
We feel, in software, user experience and user talk fulfillment is more important than feature set expansion. A software product which fulfills the needs and expectations of the user is better than a product which is more feature rich but difficult to use. This has been the core of Dimdim's product management philosophy and it is this principle which guides us.
Features which are not central to the core functionality set of Desktop/Application/Presentation sharing and which will suck out our scarce resources are not given priority unless our user communities ask for them. This means that our engineers can focus on making the core features easier to use and the product in general will be more stable. This underlines the philosophy we are following for our Beta release slated for release around January 2007.
New features in this release will include two way Audio and Video along with a much more scalable backend server. The UI (User Interface) is also being completely redesigned to ensure optimum usage of screen real estate. More features like collaborative whiteboard and recording and archiving will follow. To achieve this, we may have to sacrifice the "Remote Control" feature, where the presenter can control the Attendee's computer. This feature will follow in later versions of the product.
Of course, this kind of development where the stress is on user experience means that the focus should be on a task oriented fulfillment of user expectations. What I mean by this is, adding features only for the sake of adding features is not the way. Features will be added if they are required to complete the user experience as expected. For example, look at this ridiculous situation of Windows Vista presenting the user with Nine (yeah, that's right) different options when a user wants to shut down the machine. Now, as reported by a developer who has worked on this particular feature, such a situation arises because decisions are not made with user intention (and expectation) in mind but by a group (in this case 43) people who take decisions depending on requirements/limitations defined by other groups of developers working on related code.
In Dimdim too we had a situation where many options could be set by the Presenter of a web meeting and the straight forward way of doing this would be to present all these options upfront before the start of the meeting. But this would have resulted in a situation where by even before the meeting begins, the presenter is confronted with a long list of options which have to be defined. This is not desirable user experience. So we took a call that expected values of parameters (like all participants will be able to chat with each other by default while they will not be able to start their video feeds by default) would be already defined when the meeting starts while at the same time giving the flexibility to change these values at any time.
Of course, Dimdim does not even have 43 employees! That's where our user community helps us ensure that all of our product designs are community decisions and not "committee decisions". So when you receive an email invite to participate in our hosted Beta, please let us know what you think about Dimdim and how we can make it better.
Ps: Did I mention that you can register for the free hosted invite from our website at www.dimdim.com