Using Utensils

Hitting the Sweet Spot

Every possible feature or fewer well integrated features?

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a recurring theme floating around the interweb talking about this issue. The focus of all of these articles, blogs, and videocasts varied widely from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

Word vs Writely

Word’s feature bloat has turned it into a behemoth of a program with hundreds of features that the average user is completely unaware of there function and/or location (when was the last time you had Word help you write a letter or used the OCR feature to turn characters written on screen into to document text).

…most users will think it’s cool then simply move on…

Now look at Writely. It’s kept it feature set small, but it is constantly trying to improve how it interfaces with other features and products. Other products is key, Writely is free so it’s not trying to get it’s users to buy the latest version or a related program. Microsoft in general is great at importing data from other sources, but exporting to non-Microsoft platforms / products is generally a pain in the ass. (In full disclosure, I wrote this in Writely and simply pressed Publish to Blog.)

It appears that Microsoft is slowly getting the idea and has completely redesigned the interface in an attempt to make the features more accessible.

Hitting the Sweet Spot

Designers and developer should be shooting for the magical features Sweet Spot.

There is a lot to be said for kick ass new features and ideas but if those features aren’t well thought out, well executed and/or robust enough most users will think it’s cool then simply move on to the next site. However if there is a multitude of scattered features users will just get frustrated and leave.

Hitting that S-Spot often requires time, experimenting, and user feedback but once the features have reached the point where they are interactive, robust, and more importantly useful the users will keep coming back for more.