Adaptive Path Blog

A recent article in the New Yorker by James “Wisdom of Crowds” Surowiecki notes that consumers love features on their devices:

[A]lthough 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.

Don Norman a few months back also examined this phenomenon:

Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?

Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.

Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven’t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.

Norman, after some harsh (and probably unwarranted) criticism, added an addendum to this piece (which is longer than the initial article!) in which he says, “[P]eople are not willing to pay for a system that looks simpler because it looks less capable. Hence the fully automatic system that still contains lots of buttons and knobs.” He also points to an article by Joel Spolsky that echoes his point.

Norman’s solution is this:

[Make] the actual complexity low, the real simplicity high. That’s an exciting design challenge: make it look powerful while also making it easy to use.

While Norman (why do I want to call him Don?) has a point, I think there might be one other thing to think about: don’t play in the features game at all. Because let’s face it: most features are commodities that will likely be replicated eventually. Instead, it is about the connection between the features that will create both product loyalty and product desire. That connection is much harder to reproduce. That is where design (and not engineering) comes in. First to create an strategy for which features should be included (or at least emphasized) and then a design to stitch those features together in a useful, usable, and pleasing way.

The iPod didn’t beat out other MP3 players because it had the most memory. Indeed, no one buys any Apple product for the feature set (or if they do, they are pretty silly — you can get a comparable PC for considerably cheaper). People buy Apple products because of how well the features fit together, not for the feature set alone.

Or take the Wii. Look at its packaging. It’s not eating the Playstation 3’s lunch because its features are better (they aren’t). It sidestepped the feature war and provided a better gaming experience. Yes, the graphics suck and it’s pretty primitive, but that doesn’t matter because the features they do have are better put together and more fun than those of the PS3 (at least currently).

The marketing of Apple’s products and the Wii both reflect this circumventing of specs. And we see this all the time in other industries. Do you think the Scion sells customers on its horsepower? W Hotels on the square footage of their rooms? Like Norman says, people want to feel that they are getting something — some value — for their money. In lieu of anything other feeling — desire, joy, playfulness, luxury, etc. — people will turn to power, possibly out of fear. (”It’s ugly as hell but at least this thing will work. I hope.”) Rather than, as Norman puts it elsewhere, helping a product work better because it is attractive, people instead pray their overcomplicated gadget at least works well. The feature list makes them — us — feel more comfortable with our decision so that we hopefully won’t regret it in the future (as the descriptive theory of decision making tells us).

Instead of the engineering specs, design and marketing have to work together to figure out what the story of the product is, how all the features fit together into a unified product that can be sold and enjoyed. We don’t need to sell simplicity any more than we should sell complexity. We need to sell — and design — products that are useful, usable, and desirable. And that customers perceive as all those things (that’s where marketing comes in). We don’t have to get caught in the quicksand of features; we have the ropes to pull ourselves out if we only have the courage and discipline to use them.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Experience Design, Experience Strategy, Product Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This post is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.