The past few days I’ve been steadily building out support in Dashify for the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, essentially tweaking the UI to make it and more appealing and intuitive for merchants.
Here are a few thoughts I’ve been having as I do this:
- How pretty or “up-to-date” the code is doesn’t matter for the success of a product, as long as it solves the problem it’s intended to solve and doesn’t break. There is a lot of old code in WooCommerce Subscriptions where I can see its origins from really old versions of WooCommerce, but it all still works.
- How well the code is written does make a difference for how easy it is to extend later on, as I’m doing now.
- My opinion: How good the UI looks and how intuitive it is matters when there’s competition. Unless the bad looking one costs less and cost is a factor in the decision, most people will go for the more premium or polished solution, especially if it is more intuitive.
- It’s easy for established players to become stagnant (creators lose interest in the product, it’s making enough money or doesn’t have much room to grow, it gets sold and the new owners just keep it in maintenance mode), and as time goes on there is ever more low-hanging fruit for a new product to improve upon.
Tomorrow I’m releasing an update for Dashify with the support for WooCommerce Subscriptions, plus a few visual tweaks for the order and subscription edit UI on mobile. Then, on to more marketing!