Comments on: “Small is Big” – Of User Intent and How Great Products are Built on Small Features

By: Nihit Nirmal

Nihit Nirmal — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:22:00 +0000

Good point Ashish. For quite sometime I have been thinking on similar lines. As i believe Product Management is to ensure what gratify users. This can be done by small trivial changes, like expanding the text area and not having a scroll.
Also, please remove the “Find your tweets” between discussion box n Similar Articles.
Great read!

By: Nishith Rastogi

Nishith Rastogi — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:13:19 +0000

I completely agree. [Though paste and go first came out on opera before].
Saving a click is big, I wrote something similar too

http://www.pluggd.in/usability-tip-one-click-less-297/

By: Sriyansa

Sriyansa — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:13:39 +0000

Have to agree with Ashish here.

Speed and security are “big” things but probably not immediately and evidently important.

An awesome “awesome bar” is. And all of the small things make that bar so awesome

By: Sriyansa

Sriyansa — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:08:02 +0000

I am assuming that when you say nobody, you mean no end user which I did not mean.

In my experience as both a developer and PM such features are most likely to be introduced incrementally by motivated developers and QA folks rather than through scope by a PM.

Facilitating such thinking IMO would probably lead to more of these features. The PMs role then is to evaluate which ones get in.

By: Ashish

Ashish — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:56:12 +0000

“No one would have used this feature if google chrome had not focussed on speed and got the users in the first place.” – that’s not an assumption to build a product.
If you keep focusing on ‘that’ big thing and lose sight of small utilities, people will start moving to a better product.

By: Ashish

Ashish — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:54:53 +0000

a) is surely needed, but b) doesnt drive these small features. Nobody will ask for these features and that’s why they add to wow factor.

By: Sriyansa

Sriyansa — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:49:32 +0000

I think the more relevant task for a PM is to a) clearly define what is it that the product/service should excel in (speed, functionality) and b) keep an open request/additions queue and prioritize these per (a) rather than think up these “delighting” features.

Without (a), the small features would not add up to something bigger and potentially introduce complexity.

Without (b), the risk could be excluding a host of ideas from the people who develop the product/service

Introducing these small improvements on a regular basis however does keep the product freshness up even when there is no major release.

By: abhishek manocha

abhishek manocha — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:56:37 +0000

very well said. samall triffle examples to emphasize small is really BIG. Brings out a very subtle point.

By: Abhishek J

Abhishek J — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:26:38 +0000

Oh come on you are becoming a google fanboy, these features are an extra delight feature, No one would have used this feature if google chrome had not focussed on speed and got the users in the first place.

By: Sai Pothuri

Sai Pothuri — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:34:05 +0000

Dear Sinha,

Thats what the google strategy.. See google started with gmail, as already had accounts with yahoo, AOL, MSN etc etc.

But the fact is that google slowly added each and every thing to gmail like gmail chat ( The same also in Yahoo new Version ) But the small twist is that what ever we chat in gmail chat it will be automatically stored in chats section automatically, this will be useful for future reference of chat logs, the same is not available with yahoo though it introduced chat but the chat cant be saved automatically

Gmail started picasa and you can directly install picasa to your system and scan for pics and directly upload from picasa desktop to picasa web albums. This feature is not available in yahoo and other portals

Not only these if you go to your gmail >> settings >> labs you can see many of these small tools where u can enable or disable in that section

And coming to chrome just its also a explorer like IE, Mozilla, Opera and others, the fact is that opening of pages fastly with out errors, and providing small and simple apps for better browsing that makes google chrome hit the market

For me slow and steady wins the race is what google strategy is about.. Slowly updating the applications with new features, slowly creating new apps that concentrate on common people its the real google plan i think so where as yahoo slowly shutting down its applications like yahoo photos, yahoo geocities, yahoo briefcase and others slowly year by year and the same google increasing apps year by year

Thats y small is big always in any way

So what you people respond

Thanks & Regards

Sai Pothuri