Paul McKellar

Here, now. Past Lives: @Square founding team, EIR @SVAngel

Decisions

There are only four decisions regarding the UX of WUT. It is an incredibly simple application.

Most of my friends who looked at it asked for new features. Comments, favs, a newsfeed. One of my friends asked me to take away one of the features.

It took me off guard.

Here is an app that barely has any interaction at all, and he was suggesting that we reduce it further. Maybe one of the four decisions we had made could be improved? Maybe adding things to the app wasn’t going to work out, maybe we had to alter one of the decisions we had already made.

Changing decisions

Humans have a hard time changing decisions they make. It take cognitive effort to make decisions and we run out of it as the day goes by. Also, once we make a decision, we have a bias that says we want to stay consistent to that decision. (consistency bias and sunk cost)

Easy and hard

Looking at a product and saying what you should add, when you have a list of features you know about from other apps is easy.

Realizing that some of the features might need to be removed is hard. Re-analyzing decisions made is a process of forcing yourself to assume you are wrong.

Discussion on HN