From Functional to Successful

My first Codegarden

Codegarden 2025 marked my first time attending a major Umbraco conference. It was made even more special by the opportunity to speak at the event alongside my colleague, Georgina Bidder. Our talk explored the negative impact of priotising low value, low impact features - and how to change it. We addressed a non-technical topic, using technical solutions, to help teams overcome challenges when asked to prioritise work that doesn’t solve problems and instead creates new ones.

Catch the full talk below 

Here is a stat that might surprise you. Only 20-30% of features are used! We are wasting 70 – 80% of our time developing features that no one is using. As we develop more and more features, the new feature adoption rate is just 6.4%. Unused feature clutters the interface, slow performance, complicate testing, and create technical debt. All these wasted efforts have a cost. An estimated $29 billion is being spent on these low-value features that could be harming the success of your product. So, why is this happening? And why is it happening a lot? 

Symptoms and causes of an ‘inside out’ mindset. 

Demands rather than direction 

As tech and delivery teams, we must manage conflicting pressures that affect how and what we work on. Sometimes, pressures are important constraints that the solution must operate within. But when guidance and requirements turns into demands, it distracts from the real opportunity. It can manifest as:

• Departmental differences: Requests come unexpectedly and may contradict previous decisions, serving internal agendas more than user needs. There is often a lack of a clear overarching strategy, which leaves requests feeling disjointed. 

• Lack of prioritisation: Everything is treated as urgent, and there are too many "must-haves" or "priority one." The process put in place to manage workflow gets circumvented. We end up with more features and more complexity. 

• Feature bloating: Everyone fights for prominence. New content is prioritised at the top, leaving later areas neglected. The result? An overwhelming experience that fails to meet user needs at key moments.

• Volume over value: Success is being measured by the delivery, not value. Features aren’t connected back to the original goals or measured for real-world impact. Volume and speed become measures of success, and teams become output-driven instead of outcome-driven.

Copying rather than creating

Marketing, design, and tech teams will always look to others for benchmarking, inspiration, and risk reduction. It is a  necessary step to ensure market success. But when that becomes the primary approach, driving the solution, you can fall into the trap of competitive parity. Competitive parity is where a product simply equals its competitors. It has the same baseline features, functionality, and perceived value. It contributes to product failure because when something is the same, why would we change behaviour? Competitive parity manifests as:

• A lack of distinction: Teams stuck in this cycle of matching feature to feature, lack clear direction, and a compelling vision. The result, a product that fails to resonate, with no meaningful reason to choose it over something else.

• Stuck in the past: During redesigns and transformation, an internal cling to past practices and struggle to prioritise new ideas. This stems from a place of fear. They don't know new can better, and the perception is the same can't be worse. This Fear of change prevents innovation. Clients need guidance to embrace the evolving landscape.

• Stagnation in innovation: When product teams focus on replicating, they become reactive rather than proactive. Investing resources into duplicating existing features instead of exploring emerging trends. Instead of leading the market, they blend in, missing opportunities to differentiate. This erodes brand identity and makes it harder to compete effectively.

The root cause: A non-existent feedback loop

These issues, and many more like them, stem from building features based on internal assumptions, company structure, and stakeholder wants. Creating products that reflect the business’s perspective, more than the user’s experience. This "inside-out" thinking reflects a broken feedback loop. No one is validating ideas with real users. Decisions are driven by gut feelings, loud voices, or surface-level comparisons to guide decisions.

The idea might not be the problem—but the process doesn’t allow it to thrive. Without feedback loops, we lose the ability to create effective experiences. We need workflows that support "outside-in" thinking through the development process. It ensures our roadmaps, backlogs, and sprints are aligned and adding value.

true's approach to becoming more 'user centered'

User-centered design is a continuous loop of exploration, design, testing, and iteration. It relies on real data to make decisions. It is about continuously refining and adapting to feedback, trends ,and emerging technologies.  At true, we use a three-pronged approach to ensure every line of code contributes to meaningful outcomes.
 
1.    User Research 
2.    Data Analysis 
3.    Operational design

User Research

We believe nothing is more valuable than engaging real users in the design and development process. User research is the mechanism for uncovering opportunities. Research can be generative or evaluative, moderated or unmoderated, qualitative or quantitative, large-scale or gorilla-style. What matters is getting feedback to avoid wasted effort.

We encourage all members of team members, including the client, to participate. From observing sessions, raising questions or doubts, to the ideation process. Ideas can come from anyone, and if we're all armed with knowledge about the users, we can all provide more user-centered ideas.

Client example: California Shutters

California Shutters is a high-value e-commerce site selling DIY shutters. Users must understand the product options available, along with how to measure and install them. As part of the buying process, users must configure a shutter, understand complex characterises and customisations. This results in several questions and considerations over the possibilities, going beyond users’ initial expectations. 
The original experience tried to guide users, answering these questions with a simple tool tip. But the limited space and redirection for more information didn’t provide the clarity or confidence users required to purchase. Information needed to be expanded to house more content, better content, and in varied formats, that didn’t take the user out of the configurator. 

The solution: a new side panel housing richer, varied content without disrupting the flow. Tailored to each product, the panel used advanced Umbraco functionality to deliver a better end-user and editor experience.

Data analysis

Data analysis isn’t just Google Analytics. It considers all the tools within the technical stack and understands what type of insights each can provide.

When bridging the gap with user research, we use Microsoft Clarity. Microsoft Clarity is a free, easy-to-use tool, that is simple to set up. It enables designers, developers, and product teams to gain deep insight into real user interactions. With built-in heatmaps, session playback, and Copilot in Clarity, you can create AI-generated summaries. It provides a more detailed view of user behaviour.

Another tool we have become fond of is Algolia. Algolia provides AI recommendations and search functionality. It provides an analysis of key trends to help guide decisions on what people see. Algolia’s AI search allows for personalised and prioritised search facilities. Algolia will use users’ profiles to re-rank results based on what it knows to be contextual influencers. It lets us personalise experiences, improving both discoverability and relevance.

Client example: St Austell Brewery

St Austell is a wholesale drinks supplier. They have thousands of products, thousands of customers, and take thousands of orders, with many customers ordering multiple times a week. St Austell use a combination of Umbraco and Algolia to manage their site's products and recommendations.

Most businesses regularly order the same stock. An ‘Order again’ feature was developed, allowing users to fill their basket with previous orders and check out. Through Clarity, we observed that the feature had engagement, but it didn’t have follow-through. The experience wasn’t aligned with the user’s reality. They didn’t need all the products in the same quantities. Users had to unpick the interaction, leading to frustration and a longer checkout.  The insights from clarity resulted in a complete redesign of the feature.  

The Solution: The order flow now shows all previously ordered items, which can be added to the basket individually. Items show the most relevant, personalised to the individual, based on their evolving behaviour, powered by Algolia. 

Operation design

Internal teams as key users of the platform. They have an ongoing responsibility to maintain content, fundamental to the experience, ensuring the experiences we craft remain functional and engaging. If a tool is unclear or difficult to use, data, information, and content become inaccurate, which ultimately leads to a poor experience, and internal teams lose faith in the technical solution.

We highlighted several key CMS tips that significantly improve the experience of internal teams.

•     Interview the CMS admins during tech discovery. Knowing who will be using your CMS can help shape the type of CMS you are building.

•     Adding thumbnail imagery to block items and components. This includes setting up the block preview package so users can understand the output they are creating.

•      Plan page structures and layouts. Ensure you don't build confusing workflows.

•          Review the current setup to identify waste. Remember, only 20 -30% of features are being used. Is this the case with your CMS?

•          Explore the available Umbraco packages & tools. This includes packages created by the community. Check that someone hasn’t already created a package for the problem you are trying to solve.

These are simple, tactical changes that individuals and teams can make today to become more user-centered. It’s important to reflect on your organisation’s maturity level in terms of user-centered design—and the role you play.

If you believe user-centered design is just one person’s job, you're missing the opportunity to focus on the features and functionality that drive the greatest impact.

Try implementing some of the suggestions we provided and move away from workflows that support “Inside Out Thinking” and towards those with an “Outside in” perspective. Creating products that are not only functional but also successful.

Want to find out more? Drop us a line at info@truedigital.co.uk