Take a moment and recall the last time you spent a lot of time working on a new feature for your piece of software. An app, a website, whatever. You spent a lot of time on it. Sweated. Bled. Argued. Fought. The feature is ready to go, and you’re ASBOLUTELY SURE that customers will love it.

Your app has some pretty prominent real estate dedicated to showing what it can do. Both a home screen/page and some sort of navigation bar/panel/element thingamajig. Those two places list all the important places in the app of which this new feature is of course one. That real estate on the home screen and the nav bar is expensive. Think Boardwalk and Park Place expensive. it’s pricey because it’s prominent and there’s not much of it. Just like with real world real estate, “location, location, location”, and “real estate is the one thing you can’t make more of”. But price be damned, this feature is the second coming of the savior himself, and deserves a spot right up front. After all, how will anyone know about it if you don’t tell them? Fair enough.

And then, the unthinkable happens.

Nobody uses the feature. Well… almost nobody. Turns out the customers loudly requesting the feature for the past year are only 2% of your customer base. Or even 20% of your customer base. Either way, it doesn’t matter. You’ve now dedicated permanent real estate to exposing a feature that the vast majority of your users aren’t interested in. No amount of beating them over the head with the feature is going to get them to use it.

Now fast forward several updates and you’ve overloaded that permanent real estate with more and more ads for all the new features you got excited about in each release. That space is so crowded that putting anything there has increasingly diminished value in terms of letting users know about it.

Why not just remove the link or button if most users aren’t using it? Because you’ve already taught that 2%/20% of your customer base where to go to find it. And they will scream bloody murder if you bury the entry point and make it harder to find. Remember, it’s so easy to add things to a user interface and almost impossible to remove them. Therefore you must be parsimonious about making additions.

What to do… what to do?

Well… and this takes courage… how about not putting the feature into the permanent prominent navigation affordances of the app until you know that a) the vast majority of your customers will use it, and b) your customers aren’t finding it effectively in whatever secondary place you’ve advertised the functionality?

Some will argue… “Hey, if you don’t prominently promote this new feature, then nobody will use it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy!” And they’re kinda right. Customers won’t use a feature they don’t know exists. But customers also won’t use a feature they don’t want to use even if it’s staring them in the face 24 hours a day.

This is why you need a relief valve. Ad space essentially.

In your permanent prominent real estate create one piece of programmable content. (By programmable we mean like a TV network programs tv shows and ads… not programmable as in coding.) That’s your internal ad space. You can rotate things in and out of that space to your heart’s content. You can pick and choose what to promote based on what’s important to you at the time. Or even based on your user’s preferences or behaviors. If a feature fails to catch fire? No harm no foul. You promoted it, not many folks used it, and you didn’t clutter your main promotional spaces with something that can’t be removed. And if it does catch fire you can decide whether making it more accessible will increase engagement or ease-of-use for your customers (or not).

Your precious prominent permanent real estate is a limited commodity. Treat it that way.