The ten commandments of digital product design

The Association For Computing Machinery (ACM) is one of the most august publications for and about computing (hence it's so quaint name). So it with great pleasure and surprise that I read today this article by Andreas Pfeiffer, Why Features Don't Matter Anymore: The New Laws Of Digital Technology. Clearly Pfeiffer is sensitized to the the tyranny of too much; just look at rule number one:

1) More features isn't better, it's worse.

Feature overload is becoming a real issue. The last thing a customer wants is confusion-and what's more confusing than comparing technical specifications, unless you are en expert? Only nerds get a kick out of reading feature lists. (I know - I'm one of them.)

I am also very fond of number 3.

3) Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.

Confuse a customer, and you lose him. And nothing confuses more easily than complex features and unintuitive functionalities.

Every technology company should print these rules on posters and put them in every conference room. Certainly the marketers would be thrilled.

Technorati Tags: Features, User experience, ACM, Marketing, Product design