The power user dilemma

Do you build for power users because you expect that eventually everyone will become a power user. Or, do you instead focus on the average users because power users will always be a small fraction of the total?

This is a question that has come up a lot for me during my time at Snap, Google, and now at Discord. It was less relevant for my startup building experience as founder of?Commons, since at the 0–1 phase,?most?users are power users.

But if your product has scale, you will have some power users, which typically comprise a small fraction (typically ~10%) of your user base.

There’s two schools of thought on power users:

1. Most users will eventually become power users. Cue the Steve Job’s quote about how users will just learn to type on a screen.
2. Most users will?never?become power users.

If you believe the former, you will focus on building features for power users at the expense of the 90%. This is because you believe that those features will be relevant for the 90% eventually, and in some cases, these features will compel ‘normal’ users to become power users. Example: Instagram Stories drove lots of passive users to start sharing like crazy.

Building for power users often results in very powerful features that are on the bleeding edge of performance and UX capability. Think: Snap’s AR-powered lenses, or Twitch’s investments in latency reduction for streams.

However, if you believe that most users will?never?become power users, you will ignore the power users and focus on the masses. This generally results in simpler features that most users on most platforms can access. As products scale, there’s a tendency to gravitate toward these features, which can result in watered-down experiences. Think: the current Facebook app.

So, how should you prioritize between investing in features for power users vs those for the masses? This is often opaque and context-dependent. What complicates it more is that powers users, while fewer in number, are often more vocal & demand niche things that aren’t easy to deliver.

So product teams are often faced with tradeoffs like:

1. Project A takes 6months and is an absolute slam dunk for power users.
2. Project B takes 2 months and is a utilitarian, nice-to-have feature for most users.

I’d wager most teams choose B here. But there are times where option A is arguably the right call.

Here are some real world examples of the power user dilemma:

Figma

Before Figma enabled cloud-based design tools, there was Sketch, a clunky, local app that required sending giant, non-version controlled files back and forth via email. Figma built for power users (designers) and followed them to the bleeding edge of delight and functionality. And over the years, non-designers like me have been made into Figma power users, almost by necessity. Now with Figjam there’s an even easier entry point for more casual users.

Snapchat

Early on, many people thought some of Snapchat’s core features (open to camera, swipe based interaction) were impossibly hard to use. It almost seemed intentionally challenging (hint: that was kind of the point given the demo). But instead of dumbing down the product, Snap remained laser-focused on building for the power user. And low and behold, today >300M users are swiping to navigate and using face filters and other features that are to this day, very advanced relatively.

TikTok

As an entertainment service, TikTok has to ensure lots of users are creating lots of content. To solve this problem, conventional wisdom would say to make it super easy and lower the barrier to create. Sure, average quality might go down with simpler tools, but the tradeoff will be worth it, as there will be 1000X more people creating videos.

Instead, the content creation features on TikTok are actually pretty complex and involve many unique paradigms (like Duets, reactions, re-usable audio primitives). The result: there’s a never-ending treasure trove of content. I’m constantly dumbfounded at how TikTok was able to train millions of regular users how to create pretty complicated smartphone videos.

Apple’s Live Photos

Here Apple tried to solve a ubiquitous problem for the average phone user: make it easier to take lots of photos and select the best one. Apple’s (very expensive) answer was Live Photos, a pretty complicated product that involved not one but two new paradigms:

1. Capture multiple photos in 1 tap
2. Create a new format that’s part video, part photo

Apple is one of very few companies that can successfully build for power users at scale. I imagine this is what they tried with Live Photos. After all, the problem they were tacklign is widespread. But that’s not really what happened (at least based on my anecdotal observations). The product is too complex, and only a subset of users really know how to use it.

Sometimes building for the power user leads to overly complicated products with permanent, limited reach.