When I was a summer research student, I worked across the hall from the gait lab. They did cool stuff like motion capture and telemetry to measure the bio mechanical response to things like subjecting people to an unexpected drop. At the time they were working on a project for a major running shoe manufacturer who had a new cushioning technology. The problem they were working on was quantifying the ‘right’ amount of change.
Too much change in a shoe design and buyers, runners who replace their shoes at least once a year, won’t buy. Too little change and their competitors surpass them and buyers won’t feel the ‘improvements’. It’s a tough call.
The same is true in software. Even if your technology is superior, it has to feel ‘right’. Yep there’s a lot of subjectives in this post – that’s why software design is a hard problem.
With 25+ years of personal computing behind us, people have established conventions and expectations of the user experience. Stay away from those conventions and expectations and you risk users staying away from your application.
