You won’t hear many clients explicitly saying “Can you make this more complicated.” or “Can we find a way to annoy our users?” but the fact of the matter is: they’re asking for it — even if they don’t realize it.

Many organizations are in adversarial relationships with their customers. Customers want to interact with you for certain things, at certain times, and in certain ways. The better you understand this; the better you can make their experience interacting with you. Many organizations understand what their customers want; but want them to either do more, or do something else. At some point; almost every organization hits a point in its relationship with its customers, where it’s own wants are prioritized over that of the customer.

Much of the time, organizations don’t realize the impact of adding new features or content to existing systems, software, or products. I find mapping out the new features or content to be a good way to visualize which features are really helping the user, and which are only helping the business.

Features in the upper right quadrant should always make it to the product roadmap, while features in the bottom left quadrant should always be thrown out (or removed if they’re already part of the product.)

It’s the features (or content) that appear in the upper left, and lower right quadrants that need extra thinking. Each organization will need to develop a POV on how important features good for the customer, and features good for the business are. Mapping within the quadrant may help illustrate the threshold of good vs bad vs neutral.

A feature that appears near the top of bottom-right quadrant indicates that the feature is marginally bad for the customer, but may be substantially good for the business.

These are the most difficult types of features to determine whether to include on a product roadmap. I typically recommend that these types of features should enjoy some level of user testing. I think the features that wind up in these two quadrants (upper-left & lower-right) represent the biggest opportunities for UX professionals to help express the features in a way that mitigates any nigative impact.

Anyway, my point is: Just classifying the features this way can be extremely helpful. Having it up on a big wall can help unite a team, and focus them on what’s most important.

Want to know more of my ideas on cognitive weight & user experience: Check out my article on UX Magazine.