| There was something in this article that really resonated with me. I was talking with someone the other day about how confusing I find Facebook as a recent addition to the network and couldn't believe that it was so popular, given the fact that users are usually so overwhelmed by complexity. In the same conversation, we discussed that, whilst someone can look at my relatively trivial application interface and be completely paralysed by it, the same people might have built up incredible complex patterns of behaviour on their own cobbling together functionality in Excel to achieve a goal that eclipses any complexity I could have built into an interface. I realised in reading this article that not only do users understand complexity that they themselves create from non-complex components (or over time in reaction to very specific problems), but they also collectively understand complexity if they're on the journey of an application from the very beginning because the early adopters are there to teach everyone else. If you release a complex product, even one less complex than Facebook is currently, but perhaps more complex than it was on day one, you're releasing into a world with no resources to handle that complexity. There are no blogs, no experts, no neighbours, friends or well wishers, no adult education courses on your product. By the time Facebook got complex, there was so much community around it that people were able to cope. I think this is an important part of the "customer development cycle" that I've never really heard explicitly discussed: not only is releasing early important to help you find the right customers, but it's also important to help you increase the complexity of your product over time without alienating your audience. If you go too long without releasing a product, you get used to it and you're unable to adequately discern the complexity anymore, reducing your ability to explain it and help early adopters along on the journey. The longer you take to release your first version and get your first customers, the bigger the barrier to entry and steeper the learning curve will be for those early adopters, so they're less likely to take up the cause of advocating and documenting your product's features, blogging about it with helpful hints, tutorials and recipes for using it, than they would if they had been on the journey with you since development began. |