🕸️ Experience Creep
As we get used to a product, we miss its complexities and expect more.
Adding functionality usually makes your user experience considerably more complicated—or at least, it makes it harder to keep simple.
This is often exponential, and is why 'feature creep' can be so dangerous to early-stage products.
Illustrative example:
Mars Bank Inc. (my fictional bank), starts off with a basic offering: a debit card, a savings pot, and a really simple user experience.
People love it: "it's so much simpler than Old Bank LLC... who knew banking could be this easy!".
As popularity grows, they start asking customers what they want, and create a laundry list of features to add.
"I want to send my savings pot to my family, to add money in"
"I want a flexible overdraft"
Mars Bank Inc. builds these two features, but now they need to educate their users about them—and actually organise them in their dashboard.
What used to say "savings pot", now shows a status for who can view it (which requires a status key)
There's now a new main nav item for 'Overdrafts', with onboarding steps
This happens routinely, and repeats every month. After a year, those 24 'simple' features now represent 80% of all the functionality.
The simplicity that the customer loved, is now a complicated dashboard, a suite of tools, and features that they'll never use.
✅Productivity & efficiency
As product interfaces get more complicated, it's usually harder to stay efficient (or productive) while using them.
✅Complexity & understanding
Avoid the temptation to continually add new features, without considering the overall experience.
Routinely ask yourself if you can remove unused features.