Sometimes More is Better; A Lot of the Time it's Just Confusing
We’re used to thinking that more is better, but from a marketing perspective, it’s often not
Posted Aug 13, 05:28 am in business, improvements, marketing
My aunt’s house in small town Illinois has a large plasma screen, high definition television. They also have a state-of-the-art satellite dish, and a high fidelity sound system hooked up to said television. It’s all very impressive and cool— until you try to turn the thing on. At this point, it’s the most frustrating experience in the world, and you feel like Rip Van Winkle having needed another person do something as simple as turn on a television for you.
After all, it used to be that turning on a TV meant pressing a button. Now you have to turn on the TV with one remote, turn on the satellite receiver with another remote, and adjust the volume on a third remote. It’s all very complicated and annoying, but it’s a setup that I’ve seen repeatedly in many peoples’ houses. And it’s not just a matter of dealing with the inconvenience of having to press a button on a remote to get something working; it’s the utter, perplexing confusion of seeing 60 buttons on each remote and being unsure what to press and in what combination.
Behind the scenes, companies have labored hard to ensure that their devices are the most competitive and are loaded with the most features. But a side-effect of this strategy is that many high-tech products these days have what is called feature bloat. As functionality increases, the overhead necessary to carry it continue to get bigger and more demanding of your resources. In software such as the despised Windows Vista, this means that it’s taking up more and more of your hard drive space (now 15GB, up from 1.5GB for Windows XP!) and memory with functionality that you may never use, but which convey the idea that the product is ‘new and improved.’ In television products, this means that you have a series of individual components with specialized functions that each have their own massive remote control.
People say they want more features. And they probably do. But at some point, these additional features add only small incremental value to the product in the eyes of the consumer, while adding exponential overhead to their use. Your customer’s time, his/her computer’s resources, his/her very sanity are all being compromised further for every new feature that is being unnecessarily added. Steve Jobs understands this concept well. I read a book, Steve’s Brain, recently that talked about how his workers would labor for years on new features and when they presented them to him, he would just cut them out in a moment’s time, just saying that he didn’t like their affect on usability. This no doubt miffed the folks who had been toiling on these features, but ultimately, it was his sensible approach to feature addition that sustained the company despite being the heavy underdog in a fight with the Microsofts and the Dells of the world. What Jobs understood was that although features can impress people, they often made it more complicated to use the product, which in turn affects how people adopt the product, and how they transmit them to others.
The first generation of IPod apparently had hardware capability for listening to the radio, but Jobs demanded that they remove the radio’s accessibility from the IPod menu. It’s quite stunning to hear about, because we are so used to thinking that more is always better. But Jobs knew something that wasn’t obvious; more isn’t always better; more is often just confusing.
But, despite this, it’s not that simple. If you strip down your product, users will miss certain features. The problem is that they won’t all miss the same features. Mozilla got the idea right with their offer of add-ons, many of which are made by third parties. Good idea. Only get what you want, delete them if you no longer want them, and have fun searching around for stuff that might be useful.
You might think that this may only be possible with software, but it’s not true. You could easily have a system where your satellite receiver could download new features and you could apply them to unused buttons on the remote, or make them accessible through a special menu; or perhaps have a system in which the remote connects to your computer and can access additional feature downloads there.
The important thing to realize is that though new features seem like an automatically good thing, they are not. Adoption rates and satisfaction rates suffer when you make it hard for people to use your product, and it’s doubly bad when you piss them off.
Think of it this way: A little bit of chocolate is good; a lot of it will make you sick. Let your customer decide how much chocolate they want to eat at any given time, and try not to shove it down their throat! After all, too much at once means they might swear off chocolate for a long, long time.