Recently one of our customers came up with an idea. When I read about it for the first time I had a feeling that something went wrong in the morning, that I woke up 25 years earlier and we were building MS-DOS apps.
What the customer suggested was that we should not build typical online authentication for his application, no, he wanted us to design and implement downloadable profiles. How would that work? Simple. Just go to the site, fill in a form and download your profile in XML. And then upload it whenever you want the application to do what it was meant to, i.e. prepare printable PDFs based on user data.
He wanted it that way because he was very much worried about security issues. And indeed his app has a lot to do with personal and financial information, and it’s an area that you should always ensure to have a top-notch security.
As weird this idea appeared to me at the first sight, I agreed with the customer that for now it would be the best possible solution. The elightning moment came when I found this interview with Paul Buchheit in which he says:
My most recent project was the beta downloader that we shipped a month ago in which you get your profile in a zip file. It’s fun to be able to get all of your history, all of your photos, all of your blog posts, all of your messages going back years in one file. I think it would be really nice if that kind of thing became a standard: to get all of the data out of Gmail in a zip file, for example. It would be a very convenient thing to have. Of course, there are APIs you can use for a lot of services like Gmail to do that. But who does that? Those are a lot of work to set up versus just going to the site and clicking on a link and getting a giant zip file.
If Facebook does it, we can too ;) Although we want users to upload previously prepared profile file every time they want to use the application, Facebook case convinced us that maybe people aren’t that afraid of zip files.
This situation made me think: what do we really know about designing apps? Often customers have really sick ideas, but sometimes they come up with something peculiarly interesting. Common wisdom is that we definitely should listen to them, but it’s our job to implement their ideas. But as you can see it’s not always the only way to do it.
Lesson learned. Think 10 times over about new features, listen carefully and question your own ideas.
PS Oh, and by the way, with this short post I started this blog. I hope you will find lots of interesting stuff in here. Stuff about running startups in Poland, Polish startups and Polish IT market. Stay tuned.