{"id":91,"date":"2006-03-06T02:02:33","date_gmt":"2006-03-06T10:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=91"},"modified":"2009-02-20T19:44:38","modified_gmt":"2009-02-21T03:44:38","slug":"sometimes-you-dont-get-what-you-pay-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2006\/03\/06\/sometimes-you-dont-get-what-you-pay-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes you don&#8217;t get what you pay for."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(That&#8217;s the pessimist&#8217;s view; the optimist&#8217;s perspective is sometimes you sometimes can get way more bang for your buck.)<\/p>\n<p>A funny thing can happen when a product priced at several thousand dollars suddenly becomes free: usability polish can become really important.  It&#8217;s a bit unintuitive; you&#8217;d probably expect expensive products would get more attention toward fixing usability problems.  After all, there&#8217;s money on the line, right?  Surely users would be more critical.<\/p>\n<p>Well, yes and no.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<strong>A thousand-dollar-product has a significantly smaller audience than a free product.<\/strong>  Consequently, there are simply far fewer eyes looking at the product that would notice (and more importantly, care about) a font or widget that doesn&#8217;t look or feel right.  There are far fewer people randomly bashing on their keyboards and falling into some crazy corner case.\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<strong>If the audience is small enough, the road to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/articles\/SetYourPriorities.html\" class=\"unemphasized\">consultingware<\/a> is a tempting path<\/strong>: only fix problems when a customer complains.  Why spend lots of effort trying to guess ahead of time what issues people might have?  Being lazy and fixing issues on demand doesn&#8217;t have the penalty of wasted effort.\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<strong>The audience consists of a different demographic.<\/strong>  People spending thousands of dollars on a software product are more likely to know what they&#8217;re buying and to know what they&#8217;re doing, and consequently they probably will need less hand-holding from the user interface. (This doesn&#8217;t apply when the purchasers aren&#8217;t the same people as the users, although in those cases a product is more likely to be unusable for other reasons: the people spending the money simply don&#8217;t have enough information to know when they&#8217;re being sold a usability lemon.)\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The other important detail is that <strong>there&#8217;s money on the line for free products too<\/strong>.  When a free product is meant to be vehicle for brand promotion, you&#8217;d better put on a good face for the public and make its UI look good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(That&#8217;s the pessimist&#8217;s view; the optimist&#8217;s perspective is sometimes you sometimes can get way more bang for your buck.) A funny thing can happen when a product priced at several thousand dollars suddenly becomes free: usability polish can become really important. It&#8217;s a bit unintuitive; you&#8217;d probably expect expensive products would get more attention toward [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}