This is the question which comes to the mind of both, the Customer and the software
Vendor, only difference is, Vendor has to analyze it a lot while customer does it
instinctively.
Studies have shown that most of the software fails because they lack understanding
of their users and their requirements.
Probable reasons can be: developing the software without a market research, developing
features which are based on developers’ and management choice or taste and
not with respect to the customer. This is the most common issue found in the software
development industry; you can simply identify the symptoms of this issue if at workplace,
you usually listen to phrases like, “I have a feeling to develop this feature,
this feature looks great to me, we should develop something good features which
nobody has developed”. These are the statements & the list of features
which comes from heart or brain but not from customers. And we start building the
software around this approach.
Let us take a scenario from the Vendor prospective, to understand this better.
A software company is building an Inventory Software and without doing market
research and asking the prospective customers, starts building the software with
some great features.
List of the few features they try to incorporate in the Inventory Software are:
-
Adding of customers, products, categories, etc.
-
Creation of Sales Order
-
Management of Stock Quantity
-
Bar Code Reader
-
To-do list
Feature 1,2,3 are must and important features to have in a Inventory Software, feature
4 is the feature of POS (Point-of-Sales Software) but it’s good-to-have feature;
not important feature nor a must-to-have. Feature 5 is useless feature from the
point of view of the Inventory Software as there are lot many applications where
you can manage To-do list.
Keeping our scenario in consideration, the Inventory Software is built which have
of all above five features. And now company tries to make a sale for the software.
According to the company, they are selling a software which is good (with good features)
in itself but if we ask the customer, he will say he does not manage his To-do list
on Inventory Software, neither he uses the Bar Code Reader as he is not managing
Point-of-Sales, so, for what he has to actually pay, while buying the software?
Consider downloading Bubble Inventory to understand this article with practical example.