Feature discovery vs feature discoverability

Bassem Elhawary
1 min readNov 11, 2018

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As a user and product owner I am fond of self-revealing features. Features that you can just discover without having a pointer and a block of text on the screen telling you that there's a new feature and how to use it.

Why?

  • More slick experience without interruptions
  • User gets delighted by discovering something new on their own, a very important psychological factor that gets easily ignored unfortunately
  • Most of the apps that introduce it make me feel bad, specially when they explain the obvious.. only very few can get it right

That’s why I try always to invest effort in collaboration with my team to make discoverable features rather than feature discovery blobs.

Does this mean that we don't need to introduce features to users?

No, We still need to introduce features to specific type of users at a specific stage. Putting more effort in doing it intelligently is key for having successful feature introduction to that kind of users, cause at the end of the day not all users are early adopters.

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Bassem Elhawary

I’m passionate about working with awesome teams on building kickass products. I write about my learnings & other stuff. https://www.linkedin.com/in/belhawary