Now Roll Out New Features without Hurting the Loyal Users

The question remains – Is it okay to roll out features? Or to pit it simply – is it strategically wise to keep rolling out features often? Will it not risk the integrity of your application with all those new minor releases? The answer is, if you do it wisely then it won’t.

Of course; you won’t roll out new features only to realize that they actually hurt loyal users. You can in fact prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of your products.

Here, we’ll look into a strategy to avoid such issue

Designing Outliers:  when it comes to the point of designing outliers a good strategy is to study the different states of the user interface. In fact; it’s not enough to craft a perfect mockup in Photoshop, Sketch or HTML and CSS as you have to consider various states such as

• blank state
• loading state
• partial state
• error state
• Ideal state.

Keep in mind; the blank state doesn’t have to be empty. This means you could use service workers to provide a better offline experience to regular visitors.

On the other hand; the partial state doesn’t have to be broken. It is recommended that you improve the experience through progressive enhancement.

Thus it can be safely said, by exploring outliers early on, you can prevent common UX issues in the early design stage.

When working on a project and especially when exploring the data, it is common to group features in the following four buckets:

• Broken features – The features that appear to be broken or inefficient — obviously, you need to fix them;
• Unused features – Features that work as intended but are rarely used. Either you should remove them or need to make them more innovative
• Unexpected use features – Features that are used in a whole different way from what their creators once envisioned. This is definitely a good candidate for slow and continual refinement;
• Workhorse features – Features that are heavily used and seem to be working as planned. Ask yourselves whether there is any way to further improve their UX before you plan to roll out any features

Keep in mind; the first two buckets are critical. They help in keeping an interface functional. On the other hand; the latter two are critical for keeping users delighted. Ideally, you may want to reach both goals at the same time, however consider the time, budget and team restrictions before you make any changes