Technology is supposed to make our lives easier,allowing US to do thingsmore quickly and efficiently.But too often it seems to make things harder.Thisspiral of complexity,often called“feature creep,”costs consumers time,but italso costs businesses money.Product returns in the U.S.cost a hundred billiondollars a year,and a recent study by Elke den Ouden,of Philips Electronics,found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them.Consumers just couldn’tfigure out how to use them.Companies nOW know a great deal about problems of usabifity andconsumer behavior.SO why is it that feature creep proves unstoppable?
In part,feature creep is the product of the S0—called internal—audience problem:the people whodesign and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them,and what engineers and marketersthink is important is not necessarily what’S best for consumers.The engineers tend not to notice whenmore options make a product less usable.And marketing and sales departments see each additionalfeature as a new selling point,and a new way to lure customers.
You might think,then,that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to whatcustomers really want.But that’S where the trouble begins,because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable,they also fend them attractive.It turns out that when we look at a new productin 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.
It seems odd that we don’t anticipate feature fatigue and thus avoid it.But.as nmnerous studies have shown,people are not,in general,good at predicting what will make them happy in the future.As a result,we will pay more for more features because we systematically overestimate how often we’11 use them.We also overestimate our ability to figure out how a complicated product works.
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