Also, some of my favorite quotes on this subject:
You listen to all your fans and they always say "You should add this" or "You should add that." They never say "Take this out, take that out." They say "add more, add more!" There's an old saying that I love about design, it's about Japanese gardening actually, that "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove." I think a lot of designers think the opposite way - "What else can we add to the game to make it better?" -Will Wright
"People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” -Steve Jobs
"Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die.
It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need." -Alan Moore
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
Both cater to different markets but achieve simplicity within their markets well.
I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.
Or so I can reason around that logic anyhow.
To be more clear: I only want to see the balances from specific accounts. The two chequing accounts in this case.
I don’t want to see the savings account that has a slowly (and automatically) increasing balance because then I subconsciously count that as “too much” and think things like “I could spend a little and it wouldn’t make a big difference”.
To be fair, I’m also working hard at shifting my brain after a lifetime of ‘paycheque to paycheque’ patterns and it’s not enjoying the shift.
The benefit of having it in a separate bank is that it hugely increases friction when you start thinking about spending it, since you have to move it back to your primary first. You can mostly forget about the specific numbers in it as well since it isn’t visible in your primary bank dashboard.
I just looked and there are other options available. I think this might be the excuse for me to go to Wealthsimple and start taking a more active role in making that money do some work.
You’re right for sure, and I do find benefit in the account overview, it’s just that I only want to see the “spending” accounts, and not the long-term savings accounts.
Much like it might change your financial choices if your bank overview also showed your available credit (instead of the balance owing) and a realtime update of home equity.
The replies I made to other users will hopefully clear it up.
https://www.youneedabudget.com/
(Not affiliated, just a happy customer that finally broke decades of bad financial habits due to this app and its attendant personal finance philosophy.)
That’s why I was frustrated when they changed from a summary of chequing account balances to a full “dashboard” that showed all accounts.
Up until then I was doing awesome avoiding the “I’m flush with cash” triggers because I was only seeing my actual spending money and not the bills account, the rent account, and the various proactive savings accounts.
Essentially I had all the benefits of YNAB principles because of the tools Tangerine provided
- Those specific users won't use it anyway even if you add it
- The problem they identified is a legitimate problem that was preventing other people from using it
- Whether your metrics actually go up depends on where that feature was in the critical path of your funnel. All else being equal, fixing legitimate problems with your product is unlikely to move your metrics much, because most (randomly distributed) problems aren't at the frontier of the critical path.
It's a mistake to think that adding features that customers ask for will immediately improve your core metrics, but it's also a mistake to think that features that don't visibly improve your core metrics were a mistake to add.
I think people read this and think, "Why bother, then?"
As someone who is often this user, I don't end up using your product because I've already moved onto a competing product or service; or because I never hear that you have added the feature. Whether your metrics move after adding the feature might be a matter of timing.
There's also the chance I will come to your product in the future. Hypothetically, let's say you offer a password vault application, but I dislike it because it lacks a feature I want, so I end up going with your competitor who offers the feature. You add the feature, but I don't switch because I'm now content with your competitor. Later, your competitor starts pushing towards a subscription model while simultaneously showing a real lack of professionalism and social grace towards customers in public. Since you've added the feature that I thought was lacking, your product might now be an option for me. If you haven't added the feature, there's still no chance.
Betting on eventual competitor's incompetence in the future - is not a reliable strategy.
In such situation it may be better to implement that feature only when entrenched competitor with that feature will start pushing their customers away.
A smart purchaser will define their purchasing criteria based on the needs of their users, but in practice, I’ve found that some haven’t done an accurate job of determining their users needs, and/or inject their own agendas into the requirements.
It can give false negatives, especially with future looking and platform-type work, but it's a great heuristic for weeding out useless feature work
These users often understand what features are missing because they rely on them in other products. At that point your product is already dead to them.
It gets worse when you have a specialist of a given field consulting you on how to build software with his field in mind.
“A fish doesn’t think of water” is a fitting quote I once heard.
All you can do is observe, tweak and test.
This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more and more and more for no real benefit.
I've quoted this before, but what Don Norman says in The Invisible Computer still applies:
"Don’t ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated."