Toys or tools: Evaluating the application of new products
IT professionals are often exposed to a wide range of cutting-edge technology products and software applications on a regular basis. Attempting to evaluate which of these products will be a good fit for the business environment in which they work, or will enhance personal productivity, can be a challenge.
Basing evaluations on needs versus features
Demetrios Skalkotos, head of Corporate Solutions for NASDAQ OMX, has this advice for professionals evaluating tools of the trade that may often “be very cool and fun to use,” making them feel more like toys than tools. “Understand what you need,” he says, and be clear on what you want to accomplish, so that you are not sidetracked by all the extra functionality you may never use, or as he puts it, “caught up in the cool without the function.” Judi Sohn of Gigaom.com agrees. “Know yourself,” she says, and “don’t be lured by a long feature list.” Instead, look for the features you know you will use.
The tendency to buy additional features, according to Jaebeom Suh, Yong-Soon Kang and Moonkyu Lee, in “Why do some people spend money on the product features that they may never use?”, may be due to overestimation of the usefulness of extra features in the future, or to risk aversion. This “overreacting to the possibility of future purchase failure if they did not buy the new feature,” the authors suggest, leads consumers to purchase higher priced products with additional features they will hardly if ever use.
Shopping around while avoiding the Decoy Effect
Skalkotos also advises shopping around and evaluating multiple product offerings before making a buying decision, always asking for a demo and evaluating based on the value of the investment, rather than on price alone. “There are several products that I’ve found that are both inexpensive and valuable,” Skalkotos says, “but there are others that give you exactly what you pay for.”
For Sohn, shopping around means investigating the developer. “There’s nothing worse than trying a new Web application, and then months later you’re watching it die on the vine because the developers moved on to a new project," she says. This equates for many into the fear of being stuck with Betamax, and to avoid this, Sohn advises having both an entry and an exit strategy. “When I consider a new application, one of the first things I look for is an 'import/export' link or preference item. I don’t want to spend days to bring my data in, and should I change my mind, I don’t want to lose any time I’ve already spent,” she says.
The Decoy Effect, according to Suh, Kang and Lee, can “increase choice shares of brands similar to the decoy while reducing shares of brands dissimilar to it.” According to the authors, when products with more features are added to a choice set, “the product with an additional feature may be viewed as an improved, high-quality brand while the existing ones without it may be perceived as if it is a decoy. In other words, the product with an added feature is more likely to be adopted by consumers.” This suggests that the mere process of evaluating products with unnecessary features makes the cheaper but adequate product less attractive.
To avoid falling into the Decoy Effect trap, Sohn advises asking questions like, “Will you have difficulty convincing your co-workers to use it?” and, “It’s different, but is it better?”
“Maybe you don’t have to switch to something else,” she says. “Maybe you can just spend some time in the preferences window and change the theme or what shows by default on first view. That could be enough to scratch the ‘I need something different’ itch without requiring the investment in a whole new application.”
