The iPhone Economy app displays the latest values for several key economic indicators (e.g. housing, employment, trade deficit, inflation etc.) and draws graphs tracking the history of these indicators over the past few months, years and decades.

The app also compares the latest value of each indicator (e.g. housing starts) with its value from the previous month and the previous year. To make this comparison easy on the eye, we decided to add a green-up-arrow indicator if the latest value was more than the previous month’s value and a red-down-arrow if the value was lower than that of the previous month. See picture (at the bottom of this post) for an example of the UI.

Originally, this seemed like a good idea, but it raised a usability question. The app includes indicators like “unemployment rate”. Showing a green up-arrow for an increase in unemployment didn’t seem like a good idea because a green up-arrow would signify “good” to most people, but very few people would consider an increase in unemployment as good. So here are the options we considered

1. No arrow to indicate increase/decrease, just a sentence that mentioned the increase or decrease.
2. Using the same color to indicate increase and decrease (with an up arrow indicating increase and a down arrow indicating decrease)
3. Using a green up-arrow for indicating a “good” increase (like an increase for the GDP parameter) and using a red up-arrow for a “bad” increase (like an increase in the unemployment rate)
4. Using a green up-arrow for all increases and a red down-arrow for all decreases.

Option-1 seemed a bit user-unfriendly because it was limited to text. Option-2 was better, but using the same color meant that the up and down arrows were less easily distinguishable.

Option-3 had a couple of disadvantages. It introduced a minor inconsistency because some indicators would show increases with a green up-arrow and some others with a red up-arrow. More importantly, it introduced a judgmental element that wouldn’t necessarily be correct. For instance, is it “good” for the interest rate to go up or for imports to go up or for the dollar to become stronger? Arguably, sometimes it is good for some of these values to increase and sometimes it is good for these values to decrease. Option-3 also required some (minor) additional development work.

Given all of the factors discussed above, we decided to go with option-4 in spite of the usability question mentioned earlier. It will be interesting to find out whether users would have preferred one of the other options. However, as discussed in an earlier post on product design, startups need to make quick decisions and execute and ship quickly. So executing on option-4 was the best option for the app.

iPhone Economy app - results, top section

While writing about Twitter and its impact on election protests, I mentioned that

On another note, when twitter was first conceived, it was probably designed for the North American market and the founders had probably not thought about how their product could help democratize the world.  However,  that has now become an important usage scenario for the product. There is an important lesson here for all startup companies.

This is an important point that is worth calling out seperately. Several other companies (e.g. PayPal) have also learned about new usage scenarios and seen their products evolve after shipping the v1 version of the product

It is easy for product teams to spend hours on discussing open issues relating to product features. Many of these discussions are interesting and some of them may even lead to better decisions. However, opinions within the product team need to be balanced with usage data and good customer feedback , and sometimes decisions should be defered in favor of allowing the product to evolve *after* it ships. 

Basic (pre-ship) market research is good for startup companies and should be done when possible and appropriate, but it also important to keep in mind that the market can prove (pre-ship) market-research and developer-opinions wrong. That makes ‘Ship early, ship often’ a good philosophy for startups as long as the product doesn’t compromise on basic quality (e.g. ability of the app to meet its primary v1 goal, app stability, does it feel right etc.).

The market will give you great research-information for the next version of your product (and potentially for your other future products as well).  Product developers can be surprised at how user perception of the product (and market demand for the product) differs from their original notion of what the market wanted.