Making a Product

Writing an application is just a half of the road. Another half is to make a product which can be used by other people.

The most important aspect of a product is that it must be ready to be consumed by the customers. If a product is not consumable by an average customer then product is considered as unfeasible.

In software world it means that your application must be well-tested, documented and be ready for a wide deployment on divergent set of customer machines and platforms. Also product must be easy to start with. Average customer should enter its comfort zone within the first 20 minutes of product usage. Otherwise the product will be abandoned by a customer.

Another thing manufacturer should think of is to provide quick feature-tour of a product to a customer. The most efficient way to do that is to use visual signs, text and colors. Take a look at two pictures below:

I often see those two kinds of juice packages when I go to a market every weekend. The picture on the left shows strict white package with some green text on it. The picture on the right shows colorful package with some text and nice attractive photo of the pineapple.

Obviously, most of the customers prefer colorful package shown at the right. There are two factors which have impact on a customer decision:

  • Colorful things take more customers' attention

  • Pineapple photo gives a better feature set to a customer comparing to the blank package at the equal amount of time

So, let's return to Eazfuscator.NET.
I wrote the core part of Eazfuscator from September 2007 to the end of November.

Knowing all those tricks about products I additionally spend two months to make a product from just a written application. I wrote documentation, designed user interface of Assistant, created MSI installation package. The result of all these efforts was the first public release on February 6, 2008.

This article is the last one in the history series. Further articles will be mostly dedicated to the current development of Eazfuscator.NET.

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