Featuritis

There was recently a Harvard Report titled "Defeating Feature Fatigue", that talked about consumer sites that load up on features in what they called feature bloat or featuritis. They found that even though consumers know that products with more features are harder to use, they initially choose high-feature models which is good for business initially but has an adverse effect later as once consumers have actually worked with a product, usability starts to matter more to them than capability.

There’re lots of consumer internet plays that are guilty of this. It is a very common dilemma of striking the right balance between giving users enough and potentially giving them too much. From a business perspective, companies try to one-up each other by offering more in competing for sometimes fickle users. We sometimes want to pull out all the stops burying ourselves in feature creep, and lose sight of the real value being offered. So, how do you balance the need to provide adequate feature set with usability? The answer might surprise some. "The authors' analytical model guides companies toward a happy middle ground: maximizing the net present value of the typical customer's profit stream. The authors also advise companies to build simpler products, help consumers learn which products suit their needs, develop products that do one thing very well, and design market research in which consumers use actual products or prototypes."