Featuritis Example

The Running on Root blog touches on problems with overemphasis on features:

"The temptation seems to be to get into a feature war with everyone else. Once you’ve exhausted all of the useful features you start to include numerous niche features and one-off customer requests. Dump these onto a product sheet in no particular order and you look just as good, if not better than all of your competitors. A lot of these features aren’t likely to matter very much to the people that use the software, so you need to get some marketing materials, product advocates, consultants, etc to push your product to the people that make the decisions (and don’t actually use the product). "

Features are important, because they typically are easy to communicate. But don't lose sight of usability and the goals that users are trying to achieve with your product.

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