“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford

When buying something new, whether its something large like a laptop or HDTV or simply a software suite to manage our bills, what is one of the biggest factors we like to consider when researching the purchase? We like features. We want our new “thing” to slice, dice, and maybe even mow our lawn. With the proliferation of ways to research items online, we read reviews from consumers, online magazines, field “experts”, and even the marketing fluff from the product’s website.

In Feature Presentation, James Surowiecki talks about feature creep and how the inclusion of more and more unnecessary features costs the consumer money and time. He states:

“You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in 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.

He also mentions a study where consumers were given the task to pick an item from a choice of three and then add up to 25 additional features. A large majority of them picked the one with the most features and then added an average of 20 additional custom features. When asked to use the device, however, they quickly became frustrated and switched to a simpler model.

This leaves companies with important decisions when it comes to designing a new product. Do they aim for simplicity and risk being seen as “cheap and underpowered”, or do they pile on as many features as possible and hope to at least make the product relatively usable. The problem revolved around the tested idea that people are poor at deciding what they will need for a future product. The product needs to have all the bells and whistles to entice buyers to choose the product, but must also be well designed to be highly usable. The I-Phone is a popular product that has taken this approach.

In a recent blog, Photoshop Senior Product Manager John Nack spoke about this issue as it relates to Adobe when designing new versions of Photoshop. It came from an earlier post by Scott Kelby, president of the National Association for Photoshop Professionals where he proposed that Adobe have a way for users to submit official ideas for the next version of the software. He stated that Adobe would show everyone the top 10 ideas and that those would always make it into the next version. Nack responds by pointing out that if Adobe only focused on giving users what they want, they would never get what they don’t realize they want. So, although they want to give the users what they want now, they are also focusing as much time on giving us the next big thing so that they can stay ahead of the curve and continue to revolutionize their software.

Next time your looking at buying a new product, give a closer look to how you will actually use the product. Try to realize if your choosing one particular model because it has more features you will really use, or just plain has more features. Though, as studies have shown, we don’t really know what we’ll use and will generally choose poorly. So, maybe pick the opposite of what you’ve initially chosen, or just pick the baddest mofo on the shelf and enjoy wrangling it around while searching through a manual the size of an encyclopedia.

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