Avoid user limitations

A few weeks ago I watched the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? If you haven’t seen it, it’s about the EV1, an electric vehicle made, popularized and destroyed by GM in the beginning of the 1990s.One of the vehicle’s “flaws” was its limited driving range (roughly 100 miles per charge). Even tough the average American drives 35 miles a day, a lot of potential buyers were turned off by this limitation.

This story led me to think about Microsoft Office. To create loyalty, Microsoft needs to get its user base to use more than the basic features available in all spreadsheet and word processing applications. Since there are cheaper and simpler solutions like Google Docs and Open Office available on the market, I started wondering why customers were staying with the more complex Office suite?My feeling is that, users don’t want to feel limited. They generally welcome new features because it reduces limitations.

Although users will always have access to a limited set of features no matter how hard you work, the important thing is to make the interface feel complete at least 90% of the time. The number of features is not very important. With the right features available at the right time, any interface can feel complete.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Design Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.