James Surowiecki on feature creep 24 May 2007

James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker, explains why manufacturers pack their products full of features at the expense of usability. It turns out that "feature creep" is usually the result of the fact that the people who design and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them. However there's also another major cause: users themselves:

"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. A recent study by a trio of marketing academics - Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust - found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called 'feature fatigue' set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product."

Related: Luke Wroblewski makes some interesting points about capability vs. usability (also based on the Thompson, Hamilton and Rust study).

[via frog design]