Feature Creep
There’s a great article in the New Yorker about complicating technology with features that nobody ends up using. Author James Surowiecki makes some great points that are backed up with research.
Did you know that product returns in the U.S. cost companies 100 billion dollars a year? At least half of those returns have nothing wrong with them, customers can’t figure out how to use them. Also, the average customer spends only 20 minutes with a product before he or she decides to return it. Ghastly.
So why do people keep building stuff that’s had to use? Surowiecki lays out several reasons:
- Technology makes adding new features inexpensive
- Designers tend to be technically savvy and design interfaces that they themselves can use without a lot of thought to what goes into them.
- Customers prefer to purchase stuff with a lot of features, even though they quickly get frustrated with the complexity of the purchase.
As it turns out, people are very bad at predicting what will satisfy them in the future. We also tend to over-estimate our skills at adopting the new tech.
For web design I highly recommend Robert Hoekman Jr.’s book Designing the Obvious. He talks about this idea as it relates to web design and recommends removing every piece of information not necessary to a goal.
