The feature nobody complained about
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It’s funny how a feature can sit in a product for months and nobody says a word about it.
No complaints, no requests. Nothing.
At first, that sounds pretty good. But then you check the numbers and realize barely anyone is using it.
And that’s where it gets confusing.
Maybe people don’t need it. Maybe they never noticed it was there. Or maybe they tried it once and didn’t see a reason to come back.
I feel like we spend a lot of time discussing what users ask for, but not nearly as much on the things they quietly ignore.
If a feature isn’t getting used, I’m not sure redesigning it should always be the first move. I’d probably want to figure out whether people even found it before deciding what to change.
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Agree, and the cheapest way to split "never found it" from "found it and left" is to log two events, not one: shown on screen, and used. Most apps only log the tap, so a feature nobody saw and a feature everybody saw and skipped look exactly the same, a flat line. I had a version of this with store badges on a web page: one user wrote to support that she never got what she was promised, and the badges were right there under the thing she was playing. She simply never scrolled to them. No complaint about the badges would ever have come, because you cannot complain about something you never saw. Silence about a feature is usually a placement problem before it is a value problem.