The Design Challenge

An interesting article from Harvard Business Review on "Feature Bloat", summarized here....

Adding features improves the initial attractiveness of a product but ultimately decreases customers' satisfaction with it.

This is something that I can really empathize with: the Kerika user interface started off rather complicated and "powerful" and then it went through many iterations before it became simple enough for mass consumption. And we are far from done: I am sure there are further simplifications that we could do!

Our first version was really designed for power users: it was optimized for speed, and lacked many of the dialogs, menu options and buttons that are available now. Unfortunately, it took a very long time to explain all the subtle interactions that it offered. After trying it with a small handful of beta users in December and January, we decided to considerably increase the number of dialogs, wizards, tips, etc. so that there was more communication about status and next steps to the user.

I hope we did this in a smart way: we tried to make sure that you could turn off wizards and tips if you didn't need them anymore, so that the more experienced users can get a more streamlined experience.

Did we succeed?