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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Because often a software application is many things, with alot of features and power.

The people who design and build it understand the entire picture and can see the value (hopefully).

It can be very hard from the position of totally understanding a system, to put yourself in the shoes of someone encountering it for the first time, and it can be hard to see what they see when they first use it, and it can be hard to empathise with their journey through learning the software application that you have built.

This is an incredibly valuable article because it helps people who have built systems to put themselves in the shoes of their users - that is not an intuitive skill.

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Another problem that we faced at my little startup is the public perception of our product is different that what the product really can do.

As an example, we are somewhat known as an “online therapy” company, while we do offer that capability, that’s just a tiny part of the value we provide customers (behavioral health private practice professionals.)

And as a previous commenter said, you have to be careful listening to feedback that might inadvertently “over-niche” your product thus losing out on a larger market. As a result we’ve been careful to onboard users in such a way that “online therapy” isn’t the headliner feature being presented while still being responsive to those that find us because of online therapy-related organic traffic.

Marketing and “framing the solution in a meaningful way” is the toughest challenge there is. For us, the tech is the easy part, it’s the damned psychology of the users that keep me up at night – which is funny to me because our customers are psychologists/therapists/behavioral health pros.

We face the same problem in an even more niche market. It seems to be very hard for customers to understand that a product can have more than one use and that the first use they think of is not the only use.

We haven't solved this problem, but our current thinking is focused towards splitting up the application into separate offerings solving one thing at a time - ultimately a worse solution for the customer, but one with a lower cognitive load.

thanks andrew. glad that you thought it was valuable.

you summed it up quite well. it is very easy to lose sight of what your users go through for the first time every day when you are the one adding to the system to extend or expand it.

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