
Experience Rot - spooneybarger
http://www.uie.com/articles/experience_rot/
======
obviouslygreen
_Here’s a counter-intuitive fact: Chances are all those features you 've been
adding to your design are hurting your user experience. Every feature that’s
squeezed in, in the name of giving your design a competitive edge, has been
making your design less competitive._

Some people seem to misunderstand the definition of the word "fact." No, this
is NOT a fact. If you have to say "chances are" in the definition of your
"fact," you're citing something that can change; it's not a fact, it's an
observation (and in this case not even a well-supported one, often verifiable
though we might find it).

No, new features do NOT necessarily make your design "less competitive." What
that even means varies vastly and indefinably between almost any two given
projects. Any given feature may be implementable in ways that do or don't
improve usability/competitiveness, or that simply don't affect it, and even
those perceived differences are likely to vary from user to user.

 _How_ a feature is added to the interface, how the interface is structured,
who it's built for and what they expect and are familiar with, whether it's
intended to attract people outside of a single strict target demographic,
whether all features are available to all users... these are relevant facets
that make this "fact" absolute crap.

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polemic
This article starts begins with an assumption and draws inevitable conclusions
that are all out of whack.

The reason a TV remote is overly complex is because, while _you_ might not
need the "control caption" button, there is a subset of users for which it's
critically important, and it is not practical to produce 15 variants of the
remote. Google Docs is experiencing massive uptake is because it's online,
linked to your gmail account and convenient to use - but it has got a long way
to go before it displaces Word as a professional document publishing app (ever
tried to get a print version of a good doc that was exactly the same as what
you had on screen?). And FFS - has OP _used_ Salesforce.com? Look up 'feature
bloat' in the dictionary and you should get a link to it.

 _Of course_ there is always friction between features and user experience,
but it's the designers _job_ to marry the two. A designer who always says no
is not going to be a designer much longer.

~~~
tritisan
User experience designer here. I think the point of the article is that it's
the business owner's job to say 'no'. The designer can make recommendations
and provide best practices, but he or she should never be held accountable for
requirements and feature sets.

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purephase
As a developer and project manager, I love these posts. As an owner or senior
manager, I hate these posts.

That is the divide that needs crossing.

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tritisan
Funny how many "blame the designer" comments I'm reading here. I'm a UX
designer very accustomed to dealing with the kinds of feature creep issues
Jared addresses. Allow me to give you my perspective.

Given the opportunity, any competent interaction designer will give you a
great user experience, IF they've been allowed to practice User Centered
Design (user research and modeling, rapid prototyping, user testing). That's a
big "if."

In reality, we have to balance user needs with business drivers (mainly
keeping up with competition), marketing, technological constraints and of
course legal and compliance. Each situation is different, but most of the
time, whoever holds the purse strings gets final say. The end user almost
always gets thrown under the bus.

Oh, I scream and holler and hold up extensive research to back up my
rationale. But ultimately decisions get made by risk-adverse middle-managers
who are more concerned with protecting their department's status quo than
actually taking their customer's real needs into account.

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biot
I hate these kinds of articles. He gives the example of a TV remote with
never-ending complexity like pause, record, slow motion, rewind, and so on.
However, what is the solution? Saying that one should say "no" to all but
essential features is a nice platitude but, after saying "no" all those times
and whittling the features down to the bare essentials, what are the
underlying principles with which one can present those essential features to
the user without over-complicating the user experience?

I'd like to see a case study taking all the complexity that a modern remote
has and yielding simplicity. Would you go from a 50 button remote down to the
Apple TV remote which has only three buttons and a four-way directional pad?

What would Jared Spool's properly designed remote control look like?

~~~
nemesisj
You raise a good question, and it's really annoying to read articles that
tease out specific examples and never offer the alternative. However, I'd say
you answered your own question. The TV remote really needs to be nothing more
than a D pad, select button, and back button (could probably even dispense
with that). You then just work on the software which is context aware and
presents you the simple 2-3 choices you need within each context.

~~~
biot
If you're offloading buttons from the remote into a context-aware software
interface, the interface now becomes an integral part of the UX. And avoiding
an additional button on the remote control in favor of a software menu may, in
fact, degrade the experience. Having a "swap to previous channel" button is
likely a better experience than making someone access that functionality via a
software menu.

Saying "just make it context aware" is a bit too much like "How to draw an
owl": [http://www.maniacworld.com/how-two-draw-an-
owl.jpg](http://www.maniacworld.com/how-two-draw-an-owl.jpg)

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wellboy
This is great. Even more important for apps, where only little real-estate is
available and your app has to nail that one use case (because if you try to do
two use cases, your users will move away to two apps who do either use case
much better than your app).

If you totally got this post, also read this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985951)

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zalew
it's called feature creep.

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kcorbitt
In my opinion, this is one of the things that is keeping Eclipse from
progressing. I still use it when programming Java because of the 3-4 awesome
time-saving features it provides that a text editor couldn't handle, but I
just can't be bothered to learn where it hides the rest of the functionality
that might make it more generally useful.

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hvs
It took me to the end of the first paragraph to realize that "Experience" was
an adjective not a verb in this situation. (i.e. I read it like "Experience
Mexico!" not "Usability Rot")

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joshdev
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-
system_effect](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect) not much
has changed in the past 40 years

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monokrome
This article really does just assume that you are a bad designer.

