James's Weblog

(That’s the pessimist’s view; the optimist’s perspective is sometimes you sometimes can get way more bang for your buck.)

A funny thing can happen when a product priced at several thousand dollars suddenly becomes free: usability polish can become really important. It’s a bit unintuitive; you’d probably expect expensive products would get more attention toward fixing usability problems. After all, there’s money on the line, right? Surely users would be more critical.

Well, yes and no.

• A thousand-dollar-product has a significantly smaller audience than a free product. Consequently, there are simply far fewer eyes looking at the product that would notice (and more importantly, care about) a font or widget that doesn’t look or feel right. There are far fewer people randomly bashing on their keyboards and falling into some crazy corner case.
• If the audience is small enough, the road to consultingware is a tempting path: only fix problems when a customer complains. Why spend lots of effort trying to guess ahead of time what issues people might have? Being lazy and fixing issues on demand doesn’t have the penalty of wasted effort.
• The audience consists of a different demographic. People spending thousands of dollars on a software product are more likely to know what they’re buying and to know what they’re doing, and consequently they probably will need less hand-holding from the user interface. (This doesn’t apply when the purchasers aren’t the same people as the users, although in those cases a product is more likely to be unusable for other reasons: the people spending the money simply don’t have enough information to know when they’re being sold a usability lemon.)

The other important detail is that there’s money on the line for free products too. When a free product is meant to be vehicle for brand promotion, you’d better put on a good face for the public and make its UI look good.