Pleasing the 2% - why you should do new stuff

New app features that touch relatively few people? They're important.

At the Next Radio conference last week, Sarah Lumbard talked about NPR One, the app from NPR. I've already reviewed it, and been effusive with praise about it.

During the presentation - which you can watch on the Next Radio website for free - she said an interesting thing: she discussed NPR One's Chromecast support.

We released a new feature for them [the community of users] which was Chromecast. ... We've got tremendous kudos from the audience, saying "you heard, thank you - thank you for giving that to me".

Chromecast, an HDMI dongle for your TV which I've also reviewed here, allows you to 'cast' audio and video from your phone or laptop to your television.

A Chromecast - while it works really well - is certainly a minority interest. If you'd do any focus groups, I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to discover 2% of your users with one of these things. If the only thing that drives you is return on investment, you'd probably not bother with it.

But the only thing that matters isn't return on investment: it's also talkability. It's making your audience feel special.

If you can really please that portion of your userbase that use a particular device, then it's worthwhile doing so. Chromecast isn't much work; but the amount of "kudos" that is earnt by adding it is really interesting.

Much of the success of some of the projects I've worked on has been playing with new technology and new gadgets to see whether we can super-serve a small section of audience, rather than continually pandering to the masses.

By spending a little time supporting side-projects like Chromecast, Android Wear, Apple TV or Roku streaming boxes, you can delight those users who are using them; and also keep your software engineers new and intellectually stimulating projects.

Kudos is important - even from a small audience. NPR's a good example at showing the benefits of super-serving those users.