feature that

This New Yorker article has been well blogged about already, but here's my take.

Engineers like features, marketers like features, sales likes features, and consumers like features. Nobody I know will tell you "I wish my $PRODUCT wasn't able to do X."
Adding features doesn't cause problems, but lack of thoughtful design does. There are ways to get the features you want without causing overload. Here are some of my suggestions.

Be minimalistic. I don't care to stare at the "About $MUSIC_PLAYER" button the entire time I'm using the product. What's the use case for having this button take up 10% of the UI real-estate full-time? Also don't show me config options that aren't important for most cases. Use the "advanced options" button to your advantage and my relief.

Be context sensitive. If I'm playing a tune, why are you showing me both the Pause and Play buttons? If I press Ply now, does that mean "Really, really play?" If I'm editing a document, do I really need to see 5 rows of toolbars while my hands are on the keyboard typing?

Unless the product itself is an activity, make it invisible while it's doing its job. Think of words like autohide, compact, minimized, background. Everything except what I'm using right this second needs to be out of my way, doing its job quietly and without fuss.

Notify without being a pest. If you've ever had a Blackberry hammered with email, you know its going to be unusable until the flood is over. There's seemingly no way to escape the Hell of Being Notified to deal with what's already arrived. If you have to come out of the background or minimized state, do it without stealing focus in my window manager. If I want to type passwords to people in jabber, I'll do it on my own, thank you.

Focus on design before user-configurability. I'm sick to death of "skinnable" apps, phones, computers, dog dishes, etc. and televisions that glow silly colors depending on the scene they're displaying. If I feel the need to express myself, I'll wear more flair, but please don't give me the option of wrecking a thoughtfully designed user interface for the sake of dancing baloney.

Stop inventing new, less useful wheels or reusing ones that need to be retired. The "Move this entry up / down" button used by some apps for reordering lists has just got to go. Drag and drop was invented last century.

Stop being controlling in confusing ways. If you don't want your form fields edited, don't make them look like form fields. If I'm required to use the name of my dog backwards as a password, tell me before I've clicked submit and waited 30 seconds for your high tech password checking algorithm to get back to me.

Now I've started to ramble about usability in general, but I think that's really the core issue here. It should be possible, even desirable, to offer a plethora of features to satisfy the advanced user without overwhelming the casual user. It's not usually the fault of the feature list that utility falls by the wayside.