Feature creep
I recently read an article in the New Yorker magazine about feature creep (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/05/28/070528ta_talk_surowiecki). It mentioned an interesting study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics. Aparently, at least half of returned products are not broken or defective. People just couldn’t figure out how to use them. So I pulled out my old faithful Radio Shack EC-4027 programmable scientific calculator and had a good look at it. There are four rows of function keys above the number pad, with an additional level of functionality over and under each key, including the numbers and all operators. This thing can aparently do integrals, logic, binary, hex, and oct notation, and calculate statistics. And it’s not even a graphing calculator. I’ve used it extensively during my high school and undergraduate studies, which were heavy on mathematics, but have I touched even 25% of its capability? What do “FSE” and “M.CK” mean anyway? I suspect that I could have been just fine with a simpler model. Looking at it now, I still feel a sense of satisfaction peeking through sheer bewilderment. This week, I had a chance to play with the new Apple operating system, which in my opinion is suffering from feature-creep. How many ways should there be to display search results? I got lost very quickly, and all I really wanted was to find a file by name. In its defense, I have to say that Leopard is well designed and reasonably intuitive. If I really wanted, I would have probably figured out the search features just by poking around. I agree with the article that it’s really hard to provide as much funcionality (value for money) as possible without making a product unusable. People like gadgets and buttons, but when do you stop? How many tool bars should an application have? How many keys, clicks, shortcuts, and commands should accomplish the same task? I have a feeling that there is no good answer and that I will most likely spend the rest of my career trying to figure this out.
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