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Usefulness and Feature Sets
Published 2 years ago, at the start of April under Business, Design, Software
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There is an interesting relationship between the usefulness of a product and its quantity of features. Too few features—your product fails to accomplish the set of tasks your core audience demands. Too many—you risk confusing your users with intimidating interfaces.
Clearly, the fewer extraneous features the better, but that’s often unacceptable. Power users demand extra features, legacy features can’t just be abandoned. Designing interfaces for feature-bloat is almost assuredly a losing prospect, but what else can you do?
The best solution is to avoid feature-bloat through visionary software design. Don’t build the features your users demand—build the features that reinforce your vision for the product. Keep reading for more good and bad solutions to feature bloat.
Bad Solutions
Hide Features
Build interfaces that place more commonly used features at the forefront - and bury the others in menus or preference pages. This solution led to disasters like Word 2003’s bloated feature set and corresponding menu system, but I’m sure you can pull it off.
‘Clever’ Software
‘Clever’ software doesn’t wait for users to ask for something—it guesses what the user is trying to do and then does it. Building truly clever software is a really hard computer science problem—most ‘clever’ features just come across as stupid.
Rely on Help and Documentation
Extensive and easy-to-find documentation is always a good thing—but great help is no excuse for cowardice when it comes to cutting features.
Bold Solutions
Prioritize, and Cull
Build solutions that make sense for your product, and stop wasting time on features you feel aren’t important. Even if you’ve already spent time on a feature, it’s okay to throw out code, even throw out great code, to make the product match your vision.
Stop Following Your Users
Feedback is a great thing—it’s great for pointing out flaws and strengths of your product, and can also point you in the right direction for future feature sets. But feature-requests require careful scrutiny before consideration - you need to stay in control of your feature set. Check out 37 Signals on this topic.
Break Apart the Product
Bloated software is harder to sell. Marketing messages become diluted when theres too many features for too many types of users. Don’t extend software with features that stray from the original vision - both brand and product will suffer.
Enlighten Me
[...] a situation of more features = more complexity = more confusion = less customer satisfaction. Rob Goodlatte writes: “Bloated software is harder to sell. Marketing messages become diluted when theres (sic) [...]