Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Provide Alternatives

Only a few of your customers might use a particular feature; however, it’s possible that they really rely on it. What’s more, people hate losing things they own, even if they never use them. It’s an intrinsic human trait. Psychologists call this loss aversion.

You can work around this by turning the loss into a gain. One way of doing this is by providing an alternative to (or even an improvement over) the removed feature. For example, you could contact somebody who creates a product that could replace the feature you’re removing and try to negotiate a discount for your existing users.

When the people at Bohemian Coding^[132] wanted to remove the bitmap features from their application DrawIt, they contacted Flying Meat’s Gus ...