Spinning electrical sockets as an allegory for software design

While I'm not drawing thirty segment pie-charts in Excel (it's an insider joke), I try to make my house look a little less shabby. To draw inspiration I flick through copies of "This Old House". I came across the the item pictured in a "new stuff" section (a.k.a., filler pulled from press releases) from 2005 . You are meant to replace your receptacles with these new spinning versions:

When I was young, electrical outlets were sedentary, so if you needed to recharge your drill/driver and juice up your iPod at the same time, you had to pull out a power strip or find another wall with a free receptacle.. That's the story you'll be telling your grandchildren one day, after you've retrofitted all the outlets..

I'm sorry, what? This is a clear case of a use-scenario that plainly doesn't exist. 99.999% (I may be under exaggerating)  of people are not going to unwire their existing receptacles to replace them with these that cost at least five times as much. Not. going. to. happen. - they'll (I'll) just pull out an extension strip, and that will be that. If I have bulky transformers to plug in, chances are I'll need more than two outlets anyway. Now the company, which is still in existence surprisingly, does now tout a version that plugs into existing receptacles, giving you four spinny outlets. Nah, I'll still reach for my $3 version that even has two well spaced outlets for transformers.

Now the company may well be making money on the few outlets they sell, and that's great - they'll never dominate the world of receptacles, but if they're paying the mortgage, good luck to them. You can't however make the same assumption when you compare this to a new feature in your software suite. You may have the hots for this new feature, but if the use-scenario just doesn't exist then you're going to confuse your clients, annoy your sales force, and most importantly draw time away from providing what your clients actually need. In a later article I'll talk about use-scenarios, and how to create great ones (Hint: don't ask your customers what they want..)