Do you have any anti-use-cases? The OpenCage GmbH team had a big one: Someone uploaded a video to YouTube that implied you could use their API to *track a user's phone*. The video ranked high in search, so many people watched it, and signed up for OpenCage. Sounds great, except that OpenCage doesn't support this use case. It's technically impossible. Many who tried—and failed—to track a phone's location email asking for support. Even the effort to identify these tickets and send a canned response is a lot for their small team. And then along came LLMs, which intuited from this single, popular video that OpenCage could track phones. On the surface, this seems logical: area codes in phone numbers often represent geographic areas. But my own 503 number would place me in Portland, even when I'm traveling. That's not the functionality these users want. So, OpenCage's support burden increased once again. It became difficult to distinguish real potential developer customers from those who blindly followed a chatbot's recommendations. Their solution was to see how many of the non-customers they could catch right at sign-up. In addition to four actual use cases of OpenCage, they mention a fifth: their anti-use-case. Then, they preempt the support request with a link explaining the confusion. Even better, they can help their REAL developers by knowing which of the OTHER FOUR use cases they want to accomplish.
Marc Tobias
3mo
If a user selects that option the next page will present an error. We tried immediate error, bold text, disabling the radio button but found then users will just click one of the other answers. Some users think it's something we offered in the past.
Marc Tobias
3mo
Another twist: There is a company that offers phone tracking. They sent the "victim" a text message with an URL, once they click they record the IP or browser location (not sure what exactly). Apparently scammy because they sell $29/month subscription and make it very hard to cancel. And on the credit card statement it will say "geosearch". We have a product called "geosearch", too. So we had users complain to us why we take their money (we haven't, different company!). One threatened us with police if we don't cancel their subscription.
Technical content strategy that helps marketers attract developers
3moEvery dev tool probably has anti-use-cases, even if they aren't causing the same burden as phone number search was for OpenCage. One of our clients had an integration that received great traffic from search. That seemed like an obvious thing to build out until we found out it also had a support burden. Another client was proud of their beginner tutorials, but they didn't make sense for their sophisticated platform. Their enterprise engineer audience needed more advanced examples. Do you have anti-use-case? If not yet, got any ideas of what they could be?