I was most proud of a feature that no one ever used.

Six weeks into developing a customizable reporting dashboard which looked cool in the demo and got the biggest buzz amongst beta testers when interviewed, usage stats after three months revealed that less than 2% of active users ever accessed it.

In the meantime, our users needed a minor tweak which would allow for exporting a table into a CSV file format – which took us about a day of contracting work to implement. Now, a third of our active accounts use it on a weekly basis.

I strongly believe that a feature's appeal and its actual adoption by end-users are two entirely different beasts, and I allowed myself to be misguided by the former for quite some time. How do you prevent yourself from being seduced by your own demonstration?