The spiral of complexity and feature creep - New Yorker article
James Surowiecki has written a nice article Feature Presentation about why companies build complexity into their products and more importantly to you--why you buy into it. People want all the bells and whistles but overestimate their ability to use all the features. The challenge is to make complex things simple.
The fluent UI in Office 2007 is a good example of how MS is attempting to make complex things simple. Sometimes a better user experience it isn't about creating new features but rather retuning existing features to be more intuitive and easier to use.
Comments
Anonymous
May 31, 2007
Thanks a lot, Clint. That's a very interesting article. And I love the illustration! You mentioned the Office 2007 UI. As you know, there is a lot of resistance and negativity "out there" about the Ribbon. It seems that this is about familiarity rather than "bad" (even though some people are saying "bad"). And this is in keeping with Surowiecki's article. But there's something that Surowiecki left out... honesty. I have been to x number of presentations about Office 2007 where we saw and heard what a fantastic thing the Ribbon is, and all the advantages and reasons and justifications. But so far, I didn't see any Microsoft person state that this is going to take some serious time and effort to learn and adjust and get familiar. I'm not a marketer, but I wonder whether the resistance would be less if people were given realistic expectations.Anonymous
June 01, 2007
Thanks for the comment Steve. I know internally, we have been actually suprised there hasn't been more resistance to the ribbon--sales and deployment are really strong. I can't remember many marketing messages that feature negative aspects of a product. Most people understand that it takes some time to get familiar with it. My wife wasn't a big fan for the first month but now loves how much better looking her Word and Excel docs are.Anonymous
June 02, 2007
The comment has been removed