Article: Feature Presentation

posted by ryan on May 29th, 2007

Clint forwarded me an article from the New Yorker this morning that I thought was worth sharing.

The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies. A product that doesn’t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. (A cell phone that doesn’t offer a Bluetooth connection, for instance, may be dismissed as underpowered, even though relatively few Americans use Bluetooth headsets.) But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMW’s original iDrive system did.

The fact that people buy and use with different parameters is very interesting. This is where iterative development can really shine. When we build software our goal is to get something usable in the hands of real end-users within the first couple weeks of development. This gives us a huge head start by turning buyers into users quickly and allowing us to use their experiences to shape what we do. Giving real users such a heavy level of involvement also means they become your biggest cheerleaders and often can help to assure new users that simple and non-complex can better better than feature-heavy and bloated.