For those of you who don’t know already, Prezi is a fun and unique alternative to PowerPoint.  It does away with the concept of “slides” and has helped us find interesting ways to share the “big picture” during our presentations, especially when we are speaking in front of larger groups.  It is a relatively new tool for our team, but we have found that it gives us a little edge that helps to set our work apart. We hope it will do the same for you!

In the technology world, these kinds of ideas are commonplace and most of us don’t even stop to ask why – in fact, we have terms for it: convergence (for those of us who see it as a positive) and feature creep (for those of us who see it as a negative).   With technology based products it is extremely easy to hide many of the conflicting goals of a product in the nebulous and mysterious internal memory which makes the misalignment of features far less obvious than my new kitchen wonder product, but no less absurd.  A great example of this phenomenon is the modern cell phone – these products are cameras and internet portals and gaming devices and text editors and document readers and weather monitors and calculators and music players – what happened to just making a call?  In fact, sometimes, that is the very thing that these devices do worst!  Of course, cell phones are not the only culprit.  We have cars with TVs and DVD players and bluetooth connections and backup cameras in them.  We have GPS devices with MP3 players and Internet viewers in them.

It seems that almost everywhere we look today, we see products that are trying to be marketed as everything to everyone.   Many companies have made a choice: instead of a developing a specialized, durable product that does one thing extremely well for a targeted market, we see “convergent”, disposable products that do many things adequately for the broadest possible market.  At first glance, this philosophy can seem desirable – more features > more customers > more products sold > more products break > more replacements get sold.  Of course, this philosophy ignores many of the characteristics of great products that are less quantifiable – usability, design, durability, quality, lifetime customer value, or brand loyalty.

I know that I don’t have the ultimate answer, but maybe this is why they (whoever that is) say that “less is more.” Make sure to folllow our tips for determining whether to add another feature to a design.