Number of words: 409

In every successful product there lurks the carrier of an insidious disease called “featuritis,” with its main symptom being “creeping featurism.” The disease seems to have been first identified and named in 1976, but its origins probably go back to the earliest technologies, buried far back in the eons prior to the dawn of history. It seems unavoidable, with no known prevention. Let me explain. Suppose we follow all the principles in this book for a wonderful, human-centered product. It obeys all design principles. It overcomes people’s problems and fulfills some important needs. It is attractive and easy to use and understand. As a result, suppose the product is successful: many people buy it and tell their friends to buy it. What could be wrong with this? The problem is that after the product has been available for a while, a number of factors inevitably appear, pushing the company toward the addition of new features—toward creeping featurism.

These factors include:

• Existing customers like the product, but express a wish for more features, more functions, more capability.

• A competing company adds new features to its products, producing competitive pressures to match that offering, but to do even more in order to get ahead of the competition.

• Customers are satisfied, but sales are declining because the market is saturated: everyone who wants the product already has it.

Time to add wonderful enhancements that will cause people to want the new model, to upgrade.

Featuritis is highly infectious. New products are invariably more complex, more powerful, and different in size than the first release of a product. You can see that tension playing out in music players, mobile phones, and computers, especially on smart phones, tablets, and pads. Portable devices get smaller and smaller with each release, despite the addition of more and more features (making them ever more difficult to operate). Some products, such as automobiles, home refrigerators, television sets, and kitchen stoves, also increase in complexity with each release, getting larger and more powerful.

But whether the products get larger or smaller, each new edition invariably has more features than the previous one. Featuritis is an insidious disease, difficult to eradicate, impossible to vaccinate against. It is easy for marketing pressures to insist upon the addition of new features, but there is no call—or for that matter, budget—to get rid of old, unneeded ones.

Excerpted from ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ by Don Norman