Lately I've been pondering the future for Album Whale. It does what we'd like it to do, and we've spread the word enough that there's now a steady stream of new users coming in each day. So, what's next?
My first impulse was to answer this question: How do we get people to come back and spend more time on Album Whale?
Following that questions, I came up with a list of ideas on how to get people's attention so that they'd use Album Whale more often. But something didn't sit quite right with me, and it took me a whole night of sleep to figure out what was wrong.
You've caught it, haven't you? I was asking the wrong question! If our goal is to have people spend more time on Album Whale, then we'd end up building features designed to steal people's attention and waste people's time.
(It's not like I'm some kind of saint. Of course I want people's attention––thank you for reading this blog post!––but I don't want to be gross. And I think it's gross to intentionally make things addictive.)
A much better question for us to ask is: As users of Album Whale, what are some features we'd like to have?
Of course it's risky to design a product only for ourselves! But that's kind of our thing here at Good Enough: we want to create a few products for ourselves, and we hope that there will be enough people in the world who will enjoy those products as much as we do (and be willing to pay for some of them).
So what are some features I'd like to see in Album Whale? On top of my wishlist: I wish I can preview an album on any list (instead of having to click into an album, choose Apple Music, and then hear the music). It's not an easy feature (or else we'd have it already!), but I hope my fellow, brilliant Good Enough comrades can make it happen. 😉