Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should…
Alexander Hussain / Trends / UsabilityIn our high technology world it is easy to forget one of the most tried and true tenets of product design: simplicty sells. Just in the kitchen there are and unbelievable amount of simple devices that we all use everyday: measuring cups, spoons, forks, cutlery, cups, plates, bowls – the list goes on and on. Now what would you say if I wanted to build a new kitchen device that would replace all of these devices with a single product? Your first question may be - how would it work? How big would it be? How could you sharpen the knives? Wouldn’t the built in bowl get in the way of the fork? Are you crazy?
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.
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