Why Features Don’t Matter Any More
March 6th, 2006
This article, via Joey deVilla (again), explains the “new new rules”:
- More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
- You can’t make things easier by adding to them.
- Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
- Style matters.
- Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
- Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
- Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use.
- Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
- Forget about out the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
- Less is difficult, that’s why less is more.
They all make sense, but I wonder whether they’ll last any longer than the old “new rules”… 
I see everyone is harping the same stuff 37signals is and has been for a while. Unfortunately like everything else, even if people know the rules they don’t follow them well, since it’s not easy.