It happens like clockwork. Companies,
including Apple this week, introduce new options to make their gadgets feel new
and improved.
Soon you will be able to zap that text message you
sent but regretted! A Mac computer will be able to use an
iPhone camera for
video calls! You can change the color tint of Android app icons to match the
rest of your screen!
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And like clockwork, a vast majority of people will
not use these features.
Tech experts told me that only a small percentage of
people adjust anything about how their
electronics or software come from the
manufacturer. Most of us are not tinkering constantly with settings for the
fancy features of phones, TVs, and laptops.
Why, then, do companies keep adding functions that
are handy for a tiny number of people and ignored by the rest? And is there a
better way to design products?
Cliff Kuang, a designer in the tech industry and an
author of a book about the history of product design, singled out three
culprits behind ever-growing features. First, companies add options because it
helps them market their products as new and exciting. Second, products with
many millions of users must appeal to people with widely different needs. And —
this one stings — we are infatuated with options that seem great but that we
can’t or won’t use.
Kuang described this third factor as the “the
inability of users to distinguish between ‘Hey, that looks good’ and ‘Hey, I
need that.’”
If it makes you feel better, Kuang said he’s guilty
of this, too. He was wowed by a feature in his Tesla to automate parallel
parking. “The first time I used it, it was cool,” he said. “And I never used it
again.”
Technologists often grumble that they’re in a no-win
situation in product design. Devoted fans demand more and more options that
often make no sense for normals. (This phenomenon is often derided as
“bloatware,” as in bloated software.) It is one reason technology often feels
as if it’s made for the 1 percent of digital die-hards and not the rest of us.
But if companies try to pare back little-used
options or change anything people have grown accustomed to, some users will
hate it. Everyone has an opinion. Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft
executive, used to joke that revising widely used software like Windows and
Microsoft Office was like ordering pizza for a billion people.
In April, technology writer Clive Thompson made a
provocative suggestion to fight the temptation to stuff more features into
existing technology: Just say no.
Thompson, who is a contributing writer for The New
York Times Magazine, said that companies should decide in advance the set of
features they want to work toward, and stop when they get there.
“Feature creep is a real thing and wrecks software
every year,” he told me, citing Instagram as a product that he believes grows
worse the more options it adds.
Products can’t stay frozen in the past, of course.
And some features, like those to automatically notify emergency services after
car crashes, could be worthwhile even if they’re infrequently used. It’s also
unpredictable which add-ons might turn out to be useful for the masses.
Kuang said the best technology products change
little by little to nudge users toward a future the creators have imagined. He
said that Airbnb did that by evolving its website and app toward a significant
recent change that prompts people to explore different types of homes without
having a destination or travel dates in mind.
To get out of the bloatware trap, Kuang said, “you
work backward from the future that you’re trying to create.”
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