How to lose in functionality overload?

This is what I tried to understand thanks to the conference of Estelle Landry, Product Owner at Pix. 👩🏼‍💻

 The process of creating a product is a long-term process. Indeed, its objective is to evolve, develop, and shape itself over months and years.
The major challenge for the product teams is to keep in mind the initial vision of the product and the vision in 5 years while improving it with new features. But above all by taking into account the current needs of users.
To regulate this flow of new ideas and additions, there are several solutions, as Estelle explains:
Rewriting the code, which would allow us to unravel a bit the given base, for example. Or the management of the technical debt. Unfortunately, her methods do not guarantee the result of the user experience.

So in this case, what should be done?
Removing features yes, but not without risk. Indeed, it's important to remember that it is much simpler to add a feature than to remove it. Especially when our product is overloaded with features. Untangling all its nodes can be perilous. What we learn in this talk is how to lose this feature overload and how to take future overloads into account.

For information, in a product, we speak of essential complexity when it relates to a problem, generally in the context of an IT project, designates the minimum degree of complexity of a program to solve a problem or apply a solution. And Accidental Complexity when complexity is introduced into computer programs, not because of the complexity of the problem, but accidentally because of irrelevant development choices.

There are a few stories, such as that of a Fogbugs company, for example, which after having experienced a featured overload simply decides to start from scratch and create a new product for a new service: Trello. A gamble that proves to be a winner. But we will see that it is quite possible to lose in functional overload without deleting and abandoning our product all the time.

As Estelle tells us there are 4 rules that can be easily put in place. They will certainly remind you of the design thinking rule:

Rule n°1 🕵️: Start from the basics and analyzeAs Simon Sinek, a well-known British lecturer, and author of books on management and motivation, explains, it is important to focus on the 'why'. Because yes, it has been proven that the products or companies that work best are those that easily answer the "why" of the user.

Here is one of the methods to build your product well: the Golden Circle.

It is articulated in 3 distinct circles that complement each other.

 Firstly, the "why" is an important part that will help us to define the value proposition of the product. Here is an example of a sentence that can be constructed to define it:
There are other methods that are easy to implement, such as the Business Canvas method.

The "How" can be built thanks to a rather playful method called Cover Story. As Estelle tells us, the objective is to create a cover, a header, headlines, and words that would establish a visual reference point when a new feature in our case needs to be added.
Finally, the "What" is used to define what we are going to bring to the product. To do this, all we need to do is create personas for our application to allow us to list the future features that we will use. Only the essential features will be listed and we will be able to define what our product really needs.

Rule n°2 💖 : Add only the features you like to do and want to do.
For this, several methods exist to define and classify them, such as the card sorting solution. The goal is to list all the features that we want to see appear and to group them either with defined categories, in which case we call it the "close" method, or we choose at this moment the names of the categories and how we will distribute them once the features are written. It will be called "open".

For Rule n°3 😎 : Think of it more like the "call to a friend" that we see in-game shows.
This part concerns me much more because it is part of my everyday work.
It's about the involvement of a UX designer. Finally, he's there to propose techniques to add the features you want at the right time. To do this, nothing better than to launch user tests to define their needs in concrete terms. They can be carried out in several stages. The first one is the 5 seconds method. The idea is to let the user look for 5 seconds at the screen you want to test. Then let him draw what he remembers. What is interesting is to repeat the experience but this time with 10 and 15 seconds. The objective of this test is to allow us to verify that the information we want to put forward is in the right place and well understood.

For the second part of the user test, use the UUT method (Unmoderated User Test) instead. A solution that allows the user to navigate freely while having prepared a brief beforehand. If the user succeeds in going through it without any problems, then the test is passed, otherwise, all you have to do is start again and improve your product.

At the end of each interview, you can also present a SUS questionnaire which allows you to determine by means of ten or so questions whether the new feature being tested meets all of the user's criteria and needs.

Finally, rule n° 4 appeals to your sense of analysis. Avoid any feature overload. To do this, there are a few tools such as Google Analytics or Heatmap that allow you to analyze the features most used by customers.
In short, abandoning a product when it is overloaded is not always the preferred method.

What did I learn?
This talk was very interesting and allowed me to become aware of what a "features overload" is, and to better understand the new functionalities that will be added to the Jolimoi business application or our main website.

Currently, at Jolimoi, this is a problem that we are beginning to face because the application is developing with the new needs that are coming from the Beauty Stylists, or simply linked to a business strategy. In addition, we regularly organize interviews/workshops and NPS that allow us to get closer to the needs of our users. That is why It becomes important to prioritize the development of new features, needs and to adapt the existing to the new challenges. For the moment, we are starting to implement the RICE method which consists of scoring the prioritization of the application according to different criteria.

Thank you ✨