What Are Some of the Things We Consider When Adding a Feature

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You may have noticed that some features get added to the product while others do not. Also, some features get added quickly while others take more time. This post will explain some of the reasons behind it:

1. Amount of time and effort required Vs how many users want it

Each feature requires different amount of time and effort to implement. After our initial investigation if we find that a feature will require 10 hours for example to implement but there are only a very few users who want it (out of thousands of customers) then we won’t implement that feature until more users are interested in it. We have a lot of users so we need to constantly evaluate where we spend our time.

2. Lightweightness of a feature

One of our main goals is to keep the product lightweight compared to other products out there that offers a solution of similar complexity. This helps our customers maintain a site that has a good balance of site performance and functionality.

When adding a feature we always look for the best way to implement it so that it doesn’t add a lot of weight to the product. However, some features are heavyweight in nature and will result in a significant amount of code being added to the product. If this feature is not really required, we will avoid adding it. We may create an addon for this feature.

We also try to fight the bling. Some vanity features just add fat to the program without adding any real business value which goes against our policy of stay lightweight, simple and functional.

3. Chance of conflict

Sometimes this is unavoidable but generally we don’t like to add code to the product that has a higher chance of causing conflicts on your site. We will take solid functionality over a little bit of fanciness. Your customers will appreciate it more if your site works in their browser and they can successfully buy from your site.

4. Ease of usage Vs functionality

We believe that simplicity is a feature. Most of our customers find that our products are “simple and easy to use”. Adding a new feature adds a little bit of complexity to the product (someone is bound to get confused with that feature). Every time we add a feature we need to evaluate the amount of complexity it will add to the product as opposed to how much functionality it adds. If the result is not positive we won’t add it.

5. Software Stability

Generally, our products are very stable (it doesn’t break your site when you upgrade). This should help you keep your site up and running consistently.

Sometimes it can be easy to get overly excited about a feature idea but we have to consider the impact it may have on the stability and backwards compatibility of the plugin.

General Advice

You should never buy a product based on the hope that a feature may get added to the product. Always, buy a product if the features offered by the product meets your requirement at the time of purchase.

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