From Made to Stick
"Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use?
The answer starts with the noble intentions of engineers. Most tech-
nology and product-design projects must combat “feature creep,” the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until
they no longer perform their original functions very well. A VCR is
a case in point.
Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a
prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s
some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s
some extra processing capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to
waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian
and Gregorian calendars?”
The engineer is just trying to help—to add another gee-whiz fea-
ture that will improve the remote control. The other engineers on the
team, meanwhile, don’t particularly care about the calendar-toggle.
Even if they think it’s lame, they probably don’t care enough to stage
a protest: “Either the calendar-toggle button goes or I quit!” In this
way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other
types of technologies—are featured to death."
As a designer, I often find myself in situations where decision makers want to add more and more features, which are often not a real need for the people using their products.
I'm reaching out to all the designers out there, how do you handle features creep, trying to avoid features inserted then being useless and of little value to end users?
"Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use?
The answer starts with the noble intentions of engineers. Most tech-
nology and product-design projects must combat “feature creep,” the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until
they no longer perform their original functions very well. A VCR is
a case in point.
Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a
prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s
some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s
some extra processing capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to
waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian
and Gregorian calendars?”
The engineer is just trying to help—to add another gee-whiz fea-
ture that will improve the remote control. The other engineers on the
team, meanwhile, don’t particularly care about the calendar-toggle.
Even if they think it’s lame, they probably don’t care enough to stage
a protest: “Either the calendar-toggle button goes or I quit!” In this
way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other
types of technologies—are featured to death."
As a designer, I often find myself in situations where decision makers want to add more and more features, which are often not a real need for the people using their products.
I'm reaching out to all the designers out there, how do you handle features creep, trying to avoid features inserted then being useless and of little value to end users?