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Issue #235 February 2010
Feature Creep
by Steve Ciarcia
A marketing guy’s worse nightmare is when the engineering team designing his latest product won’t stop redesigning the product and just get on with making it. Perhaps it's genetic; I don't know. But, all the engineers I've ever known will keep adding functions and features on any product they are creating right up until the last second before it goes to production or management demands a stop to it simply to stay on schedule and budget.
I’m not complaining. I'm just pointing out an all too observable trait. ;-) As an engineer who is just as guilty of this as the rest of you, I simply offer the old Mount Everest defense. A climber is asked: "Why would you climb it?" He answers: "Because it's there, silly." When one of us is asked why we can't stop tweaking the designs we're working on, we answer: "Because we're engineers, silly."
And, while I readily admit guilt by association, it doesn't make me any less sensitive to the frustration of personally having to deal with "over-tech" along with proper feature enhancement. Many of you might already know I'm a car junkie and that I've had a variety of them over the years. (I just ordered a diesel to try that, too.) I suppose I shouldn't complain, but since 2001 I've had a couple BMWs in which I’ve felt like I've been driving computers, not cars. They are still a blast to drive, but I'm not sure whether I feel more or less secure knowing that it's a bunch of processors and programmers responsible for "apparently" making me such an excellent driver. It used to be that I'd have to take an entrance ramp with reasonable caution. But now, with computerized active roll stabilization, dynamic stability control, brake-fade compensation, and dynamic traction control, it might as well be a lap at the Indy 500 because I could drive up the ramp just like that and get away with it. My hat is off to the designers responsible for all this increased functionality and safety—and yes, I'll keep my overconfidence in check.
At the same time, I think BMW pushed the "computerized features" envelope totally off the deep end with their initial version of iDrive—BMW's version of an all-in-one rotate-tilt-push control button for all entertainment, climate, user settings, and communications functions. Don't get me wrong, unlike the trade press who I think was simply too low-tech to learn anything that electronically sophisticated, I readily use and appreciate its functions. My criticism is that BMW did too much innovation in a single model-year change without fully determining whether the majority of drivers (in the U.S. at least) really wanted all their control functions concentrated in a single knob. I couldn't help but laugh to myself when I thought that there must've been an iDrive design meeting back in Germany before its release where the one guy in charge finally slammed his riding crop on the desk and yelled, "They veel learn to use it!" ;-) The irony in making the latest 2010 iDrive acceptable to the trade press is that all the redesigns since 2001 have basically been retrogrades—adding many of the buttons and independent controls back on the dash that were once all incorporated in the single iDrive control. In my opinion, BMW simply got carried with the "we can do it" mentality and forgot the customers.
I guess the lesson is that unless your business is pure technology, implementing new technology simply for the sake of implementing it is a risky strategy. While it's true that new gadgets and software have made our lives much more efficient and have given us the ability to do things we never thought possible, replacing the tried-and-true dual-slide toaster controls (temperature and duration) with a keypad, LCD, and 10-page user manual is ludicrous. (I believe there are a few like this actually on the market.) In my opinion, subverting simplicity with bloated and overly complicated technology is ridiculous. Technology and process are interdependent and need to be kept in balance. The most productive and economically successful product designs are those that suit the business purpose without radically bending the design process or adding an unnecessary inflated feature set simply to experiment with new technology. The best designers are the ones who don't forget to add a little bit of old-fashion human judgment and common sense to the final product.
After all that introduction, you might expect that this is the point where I detail the 10-point plan for solving the feature creep menace, but frankly I'd be a hypocrite if I attempted to do that. I can certainly point out the problems of over exuberant product design, but my job at Circuit Cellar is to entertain all technological ideas—even the crazy ones. I have the luxury of thinking "what if" without the constraints of time, budget, or rationale, and I don't have to make a real product at the end of the process. Some might call that a virtual design world with no responsibilities. Around here we simply call it a magazine.
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