Feature Marketing

by February 23, 2006

“We as consumers make things worse by saying "Wow, I really love it, but why can't it do this other thing?" People who like a technology, often request that it do even more. Eager companies rush to respond – they listen to their customers. The result is the bewildering, confusing state of many mature products: they suffer from extreme featurism. But these are not technical problems, nor problems of design theory. They are problems of marketing, of the political struggle between competing companies and industries, and of market pressures.” –Don Norman, Interview with Don Norman, Ambidextrous Vol. 2

“An effective interface design not only meets user needs, but also achieves business goals. The problem is that there is an endless pool of user needs to meet (‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’) and business goals are always derived from a ‘grow or die’ mentality. As a result, our products continue to grow and each redesign of a software package brings more features (frequently driven by new technologies)." –Luke Wroblewski, Interface Design Labors: Feature-Creep, Functioning Form