When designing an interface, every element added to the screen diminishes the focus of all the other elements and features. This is why it is so important to stop and ask whether adding that fancy new feature to your product is important enough to sacrifice the prominence of the product’s main use.
If your goal is to get users to quickly adopt and use your product, then you need to start being laser-focused on how your interface immediately answers these basic questions:
These software companies have something in common – they purposely decided not to overwhelm their users with features that are not core to their product’s main use.
The book REWORK has a great chapter about the benefits of making your product do less than your competitor. The chapter asks “Why does the Flip camera work when it doesn’t do everything its competition does? Because it does a few things well and targets a different market than its competition.” While most companies try to fight the competition with features, try beating them with less.
