Featuritis & Cognitive Overload
Featuritis, also known as feature creep or creeping featurism, refers to the phenomenon in technology wherein a product does many things poorly rather than doing one thing well. At the very least, features will be “hidden” from the user among other features. In UX terms, this might manifest as poor information architecture, but it could lead to an unusable product.
When I think about avoiding featuritis I’m thinking about minimalism. What’s my MVP? How does “less is more” apply to my design? Of course, there are a certain number of affordances and features that belong to this product, but it’s my job to make sure users are not overwhelmed by a product that is poorly thought out.
I like to look at this curve about featuritis from Kathy Sierra. We see both what this user is thinking while they interact with the product and an obvious trajectory, but we’re also looking at a familiar curve.
What’s so useful about this curve is that it reflects a common pattern. This relationship between user happiness (y-axis) and some quantifiable experience (x-axis) is familiar to us across many situations: it’s the amount of food we eat at a meal, getting caught in traffic on our commute, or trying to remember a grocery list. What the curve establishes with its single crest is a threshold. Up to this point, gratification increases as the number of features increases. After this point, additional features begin to undermine user happiness. Yes, there is an optimal number, but more is not always better.
To me, this curve represents more than the user’s experience with an increasing number of features. It is also a general reminder to designers about placing reasonable demands on users. This curve represents the individual’s relationship to increasing levels of complexity and difficulty in a product.
Now to be fair, there’s room for beauty and joy in complexity and challenge, that’s what the upward sloping segment of the curve represents. But if a product is overly simple, it is met with relatively low user happiness. It must have some substance, some feature(s) to make users happy, it just needs the “right number” of features.
If we’re talking about usability on a continuum, there will always be a threshold where the experience goes from too simple to too difficult. It’s a designer’s job to conduct research and testing to make sure users don’t cross that threshold.
A similar curve also applies to learning. We might agree that this entire post is about learning, but let’s use the example of studying for an exam. If I try to do all my studying in one session, the session will look something like our curve, with the peak relatively early and an extended tail as I continue to stare at my notes. When trying to learn new concepts, I have to do it in pieces or I get fatigued and discouraged. There’s only so much I can do at a given time before my productivity and happiness start to slide.
I might conclude that good design is about restraint and balance, but that hardly feels like the insight. To me, it’s important to be able to recognize situations like this, where parallelism and figurative language push understanding forward. When I look at the “featuritis curve” and I see “cognitive overload,” I see a lot of users’ needs being ignored in a slightly different way.
As we continue to design products increasingly small and powerful technology, it’s important to remember the featuritis curve not only as a guide to user happiness but as a criticism of complexity, in general.
When we design experiences with users in mind they don’t feel put upon and when they don’t feel put upon they’re happy. Too many features equate to a poor schema and too much for the user to figure out. Remember: don’t make me think — and certainly don’t push me past a threshold.
