Return on Intention

As a culture, we seem to have an obsession with features. We always want it to do more and do it faster. Or, at lease thats what we think we want. 

In marketing, having more features does not mean “better”. In software, having more features isn’t better either. What more features will do is make things complicated. In marketing its hard to get across a compelling message when there are 8 pretty good messages. Good is the enemy of great. Its the same deal in software. The more options you have the more buttons you need. The more buttons you have the more crowded the UI (user interface) becomes making the software harder to use. 

One of the biggest reasons we go feature crazy is because when we are trying to grow our business, or create a new product in the market place, we tend to believe that adding one more feature will make our product stand out. Sometimes this is true, but if you do enough iterations of this processes, you end up with a mess. Sometimes finding a better, more elegant way of doing the same thing is a better proposition that trying to do more things.

The success of Palm was attributed to their resistance to feature creep. The Palm doesn’t do everything, but what it did do, it did well. This is also the reason that Basecamp is so successful. If you want full featured software, go away. If you want elegant software that works really well, buy from Apple… I mean use Basecamp (sorry, I try to control the Mac Freak within).

Whether in marketing communication, or software development, focus and elegance should be first priority. If that fails, add some new features .

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Doin' it right, Mar Comm. 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.