Capability, usability and feature fatigue
In the user experience world there's a truism that what people say and do are two very different things. February's Harvard Business Review has an great article called "Defeating Feature Fatigue" that supports that theory with some interesting data.
The authors did a series of studies to measure what people valued when selecting a product, and later after using the product. The study participants evaluated digital video players of differing capabilities (or feature sets), customized their own player, and then used either a low-feature player or a high-feature player.
The results are noteworthy because they show that people change their minds after using a product:
Before use, capability mattered more to the participants than usability, but after use, usability drove satisfaction rates. As a result, satisfaction was higher with the simpler version of the product, and... the high-feature model was rejected by most participants.
This, then, is what lies behind the pervasive problem of feature fatique: The experience of using a product changes the equation underlying users' preferences.
The interesting thing is that when participants were allowed to customize their player they continued to add features even when they understood that there would be a usability penalty.
The big takeaway for me was that there can be a significant difference between expected utility and experienced utility. In this case, preferences for capability and usability invert after people have a chance to use the product (this graph extrapolates a bit from the results):
And as the authors note, experienced utility is what drives long-term satisfaction with a product.
Some other good quotes from the article:
- "Often, companies don't nip the efflorescence of features in the bud because engineers and early adopters don't see the problem."
- "Marketers see every new feature their company dreams up as a point of differentiation (however fleeting) and every feature competitors dream up as a necessary parity point."
- "If companies conduct market research by asking consumers to evaluate products without using them, too much weight will be given to capability, and the result will likely be products with too many features."
