Endangered Species?

It’s always an exciting event when an animal, long thought to be on the brink of extinction, is glimpsed in the wild. These rare and sometimes odd species are often on the brink of slipping into memory and mythology when they rear their heads to the surprise of onlookers.

I recently had the opportunity to glimpse the rare and dreaded Engineerknowsbestisaurus in its natural habitat – the support forum. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent).

Observe:

Hello all,
I updated to your new version the other day and since then my video cameras stay on whenever [product name] is on, as I have [product name] on for 12hrs a day my cameras stay on for that long
This did not happen with any of the previous builds so was wondering if it is a fault with the current build.

Thanks
Bill

Hi Bill
Simply close the video tray after launch.

It's quite annoying having to manually close it every time I launch the [product]. I don't remember this happening in the version previous to [version #].

Thanks,
Bill

The drawer is open on launch by design. There is no way to change the operation in the free client. If you want to open with no drawer open, you would have to purchase [paid product] or [more expensive paid product].

Isn’t it fascinating how the Engineerknowsbestisaurus tries to get the user to change his behaviour? Surely it’s the most natural thing on earth to repeat a pointless and annoying task ad nauseum.

This is certainly an interesting approach to product development. I have read the feature list for both paid products and haven't found anything that they offer that is so different from the free product to justify paying for them. It would appear that instead of improving the paid products to the point where users would be willing to buy them, the company has chosen to make the free product so annoying that users will want to use something else. It seems to me that the only flaw in that reasoning is that there is no guarantee that when users switch products, they will be switching (or upgrading) to the company’s paid products. They could simply choose a similar free product from another company – a company that listens to and understand their users.

I would suggest that they conduct some true user research to understand what features users really need and find valuable. Some competitive analysis is in order to understand what features users would expect to pay for and which they would expect for free. Finally, some decent interaction design is needed so that the user experience sets the product apart from the competition and not just the price.

... but that's just my $0.02