Simplessity » Archives for February, 2006

The ACM has an article called Why Features Don't Matter Anymore: The New Laws Of Digital Technology. In it they discuss 10 fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology:

• More features isn't better, it's worse.
• You can't make things easier by adding to them.
• Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
• Style matters
• Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
• Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
• Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use.
• Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
• Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
• Less is difficult, that's why less is more

Via Brandon Harper.

This parody is a bit of an exaggeration, but illistrates the point of how trying to do too much can really detract from the value of your offering. Via Sam Ruby.