Kathy Sierra wrote a great post back in 2005 called Featuritis vs the Happy User Peak. It’s well worth a read if you’re involved in any sort of product development - software, dog houses, electronic voting machines. The general gist of the post is that adding features does NOT add value - the secret to creating a great product is adding just the right features to give the most value, making them perfect, and then stopping.

Software companies don’t like this. The last company I worked for in the UK had what might have been a great product, but ruined it by continuously piling on feature after feature. They did this so their sales team could say to a customer: “Yes, our product does that too!” The end result was two years of development, a product that kept crashing through lack of testing, a dissatisfied customer base, and an even more dissatisfied work force. And of course, low sales.

To borrow a line from Kathy’s post: “Don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!”

I’ve tried to follow this advice with PageFour, choosing to add features only when they add value to the product for most users, and impact little on usability. The Search and Merge Pages in the recent release are examples of this. But I haven’t always been so successful in the features I’ve chosen to add. My feeling is that version 1.50 strayed a little off course, with the inclusion of Smart-Edit.

This is a great feature, and I use it all the time. It was designed to identify over-used phrases - something that has always plagued my own writing - and I’ll be running it on this post as soon as I finish. But it’s complicated. And it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of PageFour.

The problem, is that recently I’ve been thinking of numerous additions that could be made to Smart-Edit, making it much more powerful. Each one would benefit a certain proportion of users, but these users would, of necessity, be people who have no problem running complex bits of functionality, adjusting configuration settings, and playing with the features until they obtain the best results. And this is NOT most PageFour users.

PageFour was designed with simplicity in mind, and Smart-Edit, and the extra features I’ve been thinking about, are not simple. But don’t panic! The current incarnation of Smart-Edit will be staying where it is.

So I’ve been considering a spin off product - a product built around Smart-Edit, and incorporating all the extra functionality that would only weaken PageFour. To offer a general outline: the product would be designed for use on a first draft of your 80-100,000 word manuscript, just as you begin editing and revising. As with Smart-Edit, it would not tell you what to do, only highlight areas that you might want to look at in more detail.

I’ve drawn up a list of features it might contain. It’s a very rough and ready list I put together yesterday evening, but should give a taste of what I believe IS achievable through software.

  • List of over-used phrases, as with the current incarnation of Smart-Edit.
  • Highlight excessive use of certain phrases at the beginning of sentences.
  • Flag potentially awkward tags used in dialog. For example: ‘she snarled’, ‘he bellowed’.
  • Over us of ‘…’ of ‘-’ in dialog. A lot of amateur writing tends to suffer from an abundance of dialog interruptions through ellipses and dashes.
  • Frequency of adverbs in sentences. How many or what proportion of sentences include adverbs? And are multiple or strings of adverbs used in the same sentence?
  • Highlight weak qualifiers - such as very, a bit, fairly, quite, slightly.
  • Excessive use of The, A and And to begin sentences, as well as There was or There were.
  • Highlight redundant words. For example: a cold chill, the end result.
  • Use of weak phrases: The fact that - of the (students of the college instead of college students), She began to - He started - appeared to - seemed to, etc.
  • Use of ‘then’ in place of ‘and’ or a new sentence - she did this, then she did the other…
  • Flag clichés - a trusted servant, a mighty warrior…
  • Flag sentences without verbs - excluding dialog, of course.
  • Excessive use of punctuation - exclamation marks, for example.

Before anyone leaves an angry comment along the lines of “But Faulkner did that ALL the time!”, I should point out that features like those above, and like Smart-Edit in the current version of PageFour, only point out POTENTIAL problems. It’s always down to the writer to decide if they actually are problems, and make corrections where needed.

The intention would be to make the product fully customisable, with the user capable of editing lists of ‘weak’ words or phrases and saying whether something constitutes a serious problem or not. Creating a separate product independent of PageFour means that the potential user base would be far larger, while PageFour itself would not be contaminated with new and complicated features.

I’m very interested in hearing feedback on this - do you you think it’s a good idea or not? Does it have potential? Would YOU use it? If not, why not? Have I left anything obvious out?