How do we decide what to do next?
Every day, we get many feature requests here at OfficeTime. And we love adding new features! It’s fun, rewarding and makes for good marketing. And you know what? It’s exactly the wrong thing to do.
When you focus on features, you end up with an app like Microsoft Word. It’s got more buttons than the space shuttle and requires computing power that used to be used for rendering workstations.
Our priorities are this:
* Fix bugs
* Fix irritations
* Improve existing features
* Add new features
And frankly, that’s hard to do. Little improvements are unsexy and often take longer than the original feature. But it’s worth it.
I believe great apps are not those that do everything. Great apps are the ones that do something well. And how do you define doing something well? It’s not always about power. It’s about being able to do the task with the minimum amount of friction. The more you have to think about using an app, the more you are distracted from doing the work you’ve set out to do.
Starting with a well planned interface is a great start. But even with testing and focus groups, you’ll never get it right the first time. That’s why continually refining based on user feedback of it actually being used in the real world is the best way to smooth the user experience.
What we do next is to find the things that reduce time and friction for the most number of people. And in the end that’s genuinely rewarding.
Time. The real commodity.
PS: Get our App at NO cost! Just click here! Pass it on!)
Stephen
Oh, and we are looking at better community features like a forum, feature voting, etc. In the meantime, feel free to join our beta team for discussions on upcoming features.
http://officetime.net/newsletter_signup/newsletter_beta_signup.php
Stephen
It’s coming but there’s still more to do. Internally we have it sync Macs and PCs so far but there are edge case scenarios to work out. It’s the kind of thing you have to do perfectly. These little things at the end are what suck the most time.
Martin
What’s your status regarding Dropbox sync? Manual sync via WLAN is simply not convenient enough … a user community would be great too, for example with a forum like it is available for many other applications.