VIA Interaction

Monday, May 21, 2007

The things you fall in love with might not help the marriage

The secret of the iPod is that it offered a simple user interface in an elegant and pleasing design. This is the interactive design holy grail.

I once worked at a mapping software company that understood the difference between buying software and using software. We were in a constant battle to add features in order to promote upgrades. It was all about what we could put on the box to distinguish it from its competitors on the store shelves.

So we would add in the ability to link personal databases in almost any format, enable people to draw on the map, even allow them to get updated travel and weather conditions right on their maps using the Internet. (And this was 1998!)

We weren't sure how many people used any of those features. We were pretty sure our executive management didn't. When they wanted to introduce a higher-margin "expert" mapping product, they were shocked and nearly enraged to find that all the functionality they wanted to include was already in our $50 product. We were not surprised that they didn't know about it: We struggled to create a user interface that made all that cool stuff easy and intuitive to use, and it was not only difficult, people did not even know it existed.

We knew we would benefit our customers by simplifying what we offered, but we couldn't seem to break the cycle while I was there.

James Surowiecki has a nice explanation for feature creep in this week's New Yorker. A glimpse:

"In part, feature creep is the product of the so-called internal-audience problem: the people who design and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them, and what engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what’s best for consumers. Being technically savvy themselves, engineers love to enhance the capabilities of a product and give users more control and more options, particularly now that, thanks to digitization, lots of added features don’t mean lots of added production costs. The engineers tend not to notice when more options make a product less usable. And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers. Often, the result is a product like Microsoft Word 2003, which has thirty-one toolbars and more than fifteen hundred commands.

"You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity."

Whether a product, or a piece of software, or a Web site will strike the right balance between utility and usability is exceedingly hard to predict. And maybe marketing the features but making them impossible to find is actually a strategy. I mean, do you really care about all that stuff Microsoft Word can do that is buried in some nested menu?

Apple has made a brand for itself by pushing the idea that "easier" is better than "feature rich." But given the economics of software publishing, it may just be more cost-effective to develop the features and cram them in there than it is to convince people they don't need them.

posted by Tim Beidel at 5/21/2007 11:35:00 AM

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