This is the dilemma I’m facing with the news item list, which is the middle panel in FeedDemon (the one that displays a list of articles in the current feed – it’s hidden by default in recent releases, so you may not even know it exists if you’ve only recently started using FeedDemon). I’ve wanted to kill the news item list for a very long time because it dramatically complicates FeedDemon (both from a developer and end user perspective) and it really slows things down.
I also want to kill it because I think it was a bad idea to start with. See, the main reason the news item list exists was to mimic Microsoft Outlook’s one-item-at-a-time reading UI. I figured if I made FeedDemon look and work like Outlook, then more people would find it familiar, and therefore more people would find it easy to use. Since then, though, it has become clear that RSS is not email. Trying to read your feeds the same way you read your email – that is, treating every item as though it has to be read – leads to information overload.
Anyway, I’ve downplayed the news item list ever since v2.0, and it’s no longer documented in the online help. I could really simplify things if I killed it, but at the same time, I’m pretty sure I’d lose customers by doing so. Most people don’t use it – but every time I’ve hinted at its demise, I hear from people who say they couldn’t use FeedDemon without it.
So…what would you do? Would you kill a feature that most people don’t use in order to simplify your application, or would you keep it around forever to accommodate loyal customers who rely on it?
Update: Please note that I’m not saying the news item list is being dropped – just that I’d like to drop it!