One Response to "Feature Bloat Revisited"

1. 9 January 2005 at 03:24 PM

   Mark wrote:
   

   AquaMinds and CircusPonies have always had a very different take on their NoteTaker / NoteBook products. Both products have a common ancestor in that the two founders of the two companies used to work together on a NoteTaker/NoteBook product in the days of Cocoa on Next Step – about which I know nothing. I have licensed both products and quickly came to the conclusion that whereas NoteTaker is trying to dominate the market with features (which is slowly making their product less elegant and pleasant to use IMHO), NoteBook is sticking to its manifesto (and keeping the product elegant and pleasant as a result IMHO).

   These two products would seem to make a good case study on feature bloat but I suspect this is not the real issue. Each product probably has as many fans – i.e. some people like a tool that does a specific job well and elegantly whereas other people really do like having lots of features rather than simplicity. You’ve only got to read the emotionally charged “reviews” on VersionTracker to see this.

   Is the issue really feature bloat? Is it not clarity of the user interface and the fact that as features are added in then that clarity is often (but not necessarily) lost? 37signals offer that simplicity is not the key to good UI design – but rather clarity is what’s important. Is it necessary for lots of features evolved over time to lead to a less clear user interface? I think Apple make a good case that it doesn’t have to be so. On the other hand, Microsoft Word did once upon a time used to be a very nice word processor but at some point it’s feature list broke it’s user inteface design (again IMHO). I think one of the problems is that developers fear refactoring the user interface as features are added (for fear of alienating existing users). In the case of MS Word for example, very little in the UI has been refactored since the days when the feature list was half what it is now. On the other hand, we see minor refactoring of the UI in every release of Mac OS X (e.g. the Network Preferences panel has changed beyond all recognition between version 10.0 and 10.3, but occurred in palatable steps). My current favourite Word Processor, Mellel, is in danger of going the same way as MS Word IMHO which saddens me greatly – as features are added, existing UI elements seem to be sacrosanct so as not to alienate existing users.

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