So…your product’s been on the market for a few months now, and it’s just come to your attention that someone had the nerve to build a hack for it. You may be thinking to yourself: hacks are just “cheats”, work-arounds developed by rogue, fringe users — but if someone went out of their way to create an add-on, shortcut, or alternative use of your product, what’s really going on here?
If people are building hacks, your product most likely has a UX problem in one (or more) of the following ways:
- Usability – Your product is too hard to use, so someone took on the task of making it easier to use.
- Usefulness – Your product is not actually useful to your audience without the addition of certain features, rearrangement of the work-flow, etc.
- Overlooked Target Audience – You may have set out to build a product for group x, but someone from group y discovered that (with a little tweaking) the product works very well, maybe even better, for their purposes.
If you’re in this situation already, consider it a learning experience: a chance to improve your product and/or an opportunity to capitalize on a new market segment. So someone went out and found a better way to use your product, make it more useful, or reinvent it for an undiscovered audience? Hopefully, next time this someone will be you.
