Don't judge a book by its cover.  I get the meaning behind it - don't make judgments based on appearance.  But this seems like the wrong way to express this sentiment. 

A book is a product, and typically gets produced when a publishing company makes the decision to do so.  Their plan is to make enough money in sales so that the costs are worthwhile.  In order to achieve this, it is their job to know the book enough that they can condense it into just a few important points.  These points are then analyzed and condensed even more to come up with a marketing spin that will lure the target audience.  That marketing spin is used to come up with just the right title, a perfectly constructed summary, and of course, an appropriate cover.  Sometimes that cover may be plain, but it can be assumed that the plainness is a strategic decision used to create more sales. 

Don't get me wrong, it is what is on the inside, the meat of the product, that truly matters.  That is the way that retain loyal customers, and their word-of-mouth helps create new customers.  But think about this: the average American adult reads around 250 words per minute.  An average novel has around 80,000 words.  That means a person will spend about 5 hours and 20 minutes reading a novel, and today that is considered a fairly large investment of ones time.  Imagine if you didn't judge a book by its cover and you read them all?  You would read dozens of books that don't align with your interests before finding one that does.

So how does this relate to the Balihoo product?  In the online world, the home page is the equivalent of our book cover.  Imagine if we told our customers not to judge a book by its cover?  I guarantee they would not give us a 5 hour grace period to find out if our local marketing software meets their needs. In fact, the grace period of a website home page can probably be measured in seconds.  And if they don't know how to start the process of using our local marketing software, then there's no point in analyzing usability in other parts of the ad builder software. The usability focus was clear:  the home page - our book cover.

In talking with users, both customers and non-customers, it really is the meat of the product that matters most to them, and to us.  They were much more concerned about discussing their local store marketing needs.  All feedback is good feedback, and I gladly captured it all, but I had to prompt them back to the home page to finish my planned questions.  Often they had a hard time remembering first impressions, or how they started an order, since they have moved on past the home page and on to the local marketing automation. 

Once a customer becomes a customer, the cover matters less and less, and that's what we want to get to.  But the idea that a book should not be judged by it cover is misleading, because they can't be a loyal customer until they're a customer. 

In light of this realization, I'm working on a new saying:  Never judge a playing card by the backside of the card.  I admit, it's a work in progress, but the backside of a playing card is intended to look like all the rest in the deck.  And even if the backside has red squiggly lines or cartoon characters or beer cans, you can't tell anything about it until you turn it over.