This article was first published on the Online EU Training blog

It doesn’t matter who designs your product or service – a rookie or an expert – nobody can escape the Features-Usability tradeoff curve. Perhaps you can fight it by organizing additional features smartly, but eventually you’ll start losing to it. More features mean wider categories.

When you add music to your “Videos” folder you need to rename it to “Media”, and when you start serving meat at your pizzeria, it becomes a restaurant. Features bring about generalization, and generalization brings about navigation problems.

Costumers are no longer sure what exactly is inside “media” or what kind of food your “restaurant” serves. Of course, we can choose separation over generalization by creating a separate music folder or opening a meat restaurant right next to our bar. However, with more and more features, interface becomes bulky and complex and processes become complicated and resource demanding. Thus, separation on the long-run is not a good solution after all.

5 general guidelines to peak the Features-Usability curve:

1. If you didn’t hear any complaints about missing features – you probably already peaked your features-usability curve and heading downhill. Work on simplifying what you have

2. Take into account the task your clients need to perform and identify the absolute-minimum features needed to complete it. Windows Notepad is a good example. The task clients need to perform: taking notes. Therefore, the absolute-minimum features are an empty digital document and a save button. Putting these two features together make up – what I call – a “basic product”. Applying this analysis on your productservice should help you identify what’s necessary and what’s not.

3. If we add bullet points to Notepad, we change it from a note capturing software into a word processing one like Office. Pay attention how additional features change your product.

4. Rely heavily on already established navigation frameworks. People use Windows, Office Word, Yahoo and Google every day! This means you can replicate similar design features into your productservice thereby making its’ usability self-evident.

5. People sometimes rather use a product or service that exclusively performs the job they need to get done instead of using product or service that does other things as well (remember when you bought a digital camera even though your mobile phone has one already built-in?). This is because we naturally believe that task-exclusive products have a simpler underlying mechanism and thus perform better than task-comprehensive products.

A quick recap:

• If you didn’t hear any complaints about missing features – you probably already peaked your features-usability curve
• Take into account the task your clients need to perform and identify the absolute-minimum features needed to complete it
• Pay attention how additional features change your product
• Rely heavily on already established navigation frameworks
• People rather use a productservice that exclusively performs the job they need to get done instead of one that does other things as well

Motto: less is more…

What do you think? Any story or website that comes to mind?

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