This week in ux-clinic: How to cut a bad, shipped feature
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
I’m on young team that has finally admitted to itself that a much-hyped feature of the last release (2.0) is actually quite bad. As in, on one can even figure it out to fully realize how bad it is bad. The problem is, everyone is all thumbs when it comes to what to do about it. The business folks want us to leave it in (the evil feature is still part of the marketing literature), but us UI folks are all for tearing it out – the problem is, how?How do you make the argument to throw away weeks/months of work? How do you message this to customers when something that was there disappears? I need the playbook for how to cut a bad, previously shipped, feature.
– Signed, Cut-less in Chicago
I’m sympathetic to this one. In an ideal world, you’d find the resources to redesign it and test it.
But given the circumstances (and assuming it’s not a core feature), I’d bury it a level in the UI so that users can’t find it.
And at the same time, put in click monitoring so that for the fourth release, you can demonstrate to the business folks that no one actually uses it.