23 ms·

Great products do less, but better

smallstepforman 7y ago
The pictured sharp calculator made me rage at the state of modern desktop calculators in most OS’s. The other day I needed atan (inverse tan) and found the built in windows/osx calculators do not support this function. Google for web calculator, nothing. In the end I hacked up a quick c based program. A 40 year old calculator with a 4004 or 6502 CPU can do more than default desktop applications. Removing features can eliminate a customer or two.
- altano 7y ago
  First google result for "windows calculator atan": https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3kb0n1/how_to_do_inverse_functions_with_the_new/cuw55jz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3kb0n1/how_to_do...
  - masklinn 7y ago
    Pretty similarly, OSX's calculator (at least in 10.11) has a "2nd" / shifted layout with inverses:https://imgur.com/a/xFUKxwP https://imgur.com/a/xFUKxwP
- Damogran6 7y ago
  Turning the iPhone calculator sideways reveals a scientific calc layout, including tanh Unfortunately feature bloat on a simple device often results in making things no longer easily discoverable. (I'm looking at you, force touch.)
  - masklinn 7y ago
    tanh and arctan are different functions.
    - didgeoridoo 7y ago
      To get to inverse tan, you need to hit the “2nd” toggle on the far left. (So yes, you need to turn your phone sideways and tap a poorly-marked and unexplained toggle button that looks like every other button on the screen.)
      - Damogran6 7y ago
        And everyone else uses ‘inv’ instead of 2nd.
        jimktrains2 7y ago
        That's not true at all. The ti30 and relatives are arguably one of the most well known scientific calculators in the world, and it uses 2nd. http://i.ebayimg.com/00/$T2eC16FHJH4FHejHUSZ3BSB3Dzh6%20g~~_32.JPG http://i.ebayimg.com/00/$T2eC16FHJH4FHejHUSZ3BSB3Dzh6%20g~~_... The hp35 and relatives use an upper and lower "shift" button to access the inverse trig functions. http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/251900074306-0-1/s-l1000.jpg http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/251900074306-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
        masklinn 7y ago
        « 2nd » is the toggle for the alternate calculator layout (which has all the inverse functions). The key on that alternate layout is tan^-1.
- willis936 7y ago
  Are you sure? I haven’t seen a windows calculator that didn’t have that feature since before I learned trig. Were you using the scientific calculator layout and the shift/2nd key?
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  Both Mac and window have scientific mode. https://support.apple.com/guide/calculator/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/calculator/welcome/mac https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4039496/windows-10-scientific-calculator https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4039496/windows-10-... There is also bc, that macos should have by default. https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/ https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/
  - jaifraic 7y ago
    Having used bc as my calculator for a while, i recently switched to insect - because it has fore features. For example it can parse and convert between physical units and has a lot of predefined constants. So instead of using two command line tools (bc to calculate, units to convert) i just use insect. https://github.com/sharkdp/insect https://github.com/sharkdp/insect There is a web version available as well: https://insect.sh https://insect.sh
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pvorb 7y ago
  WolframAlpha is still around, no?
- mark-r 7y ago
  I use Python as my desktop calculator.
- huhtenberg 7y ago
  > built in windows calculator Alt-2 (for Scientific mode), Inv, Tan
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > windows/osx calculators do not support this First of all, the default OS X and Windows calculators both do support this feature. But that’s not really the easy way to approach this type of problem. On OS X, first do command-space (to bring up the floating “spotlight” bar), then type e.g. atan(1), and it reveals the answer rounded to 10 digits, 0.7853981634 To get 20 digits, open up a terminal window, and type: bc -l <<< "a(1)" Or use your favorite scripting language... > Google for web calculator, nothing Type atan(1) into google and it prints the answer. Or open up the JavaScript console on this forum page (or any other web page) and type Math.atan(1) to get the answer to 16 digits 0.7853981633974483 Alternately, try https://www.wolframalpha.com/ https://www.wolframalpha.com/ for more complicated calculations. > default desktop [calculator] applications Imitating the buttons of a handheld electronic calculator on a computer with a full keyboard is anachronistic and cumbersome. Stop using those, even when they do include the specific functions you want.
- kps 7y ago
  > Google for web calculator, nothing. https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42) https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42) https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42)+in+degrees https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42)+in+degrees (Personally, I usually do quick-and-dirty arithmetic directly in the shell, as ksh expressions include floating point. echo $((atan(42))) )
deleted 7y ago
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gridlockd 7y ago
"Less features make my job easier, so please have less features" - UX designers reluctant to solve the problem they were hired to solve Well, duh. Developers can relate, short programs are exponentially easier to write well than large ones. That's the challenge. > Think about the most successful products you know. The ones you use everyday, as a customer. Twitter, Lyft, Venmo, Slack. I wouldn't think of these products and I don't use them every day. I would think of very complex applications with an incredible amount of features that I'll mostly never use. However, this large surface area overlaps with what I need. There is no "more focused" app that does the job. I would also think of the top software companies - Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM. None of these companies are known for their "simple and focused" applications. Quite the contrary. Sure, if you have a little app that's just a frontend for one thing, keep the focus. Otherwise, keep in mind that "it doesn't do the one thing we need" is generally a deal-breaker, whereas "it does one-hundred things we don't need" is not. Everyone's needs are slightly different and critical mass is important.
meerita 7y ago
Fallacy.
treggle 7y ago
This is an overly broad generalization. Computer software products can and should come in all sizes and flavors and designs. This is the most powerful and flexible machine invented. You can’t say the software that runs in them should be like this or like that. What you can say is some products do well by being simple.
- deltron3030 7y ago
  It's likely true in their own bubble of small business apps on Product Hunt where performance is mostly measured in time savings and the simplification of processes. But this doesn't hold for more creative applications that are more like games, where the time spend doing a task is time that is regarded as time well spend, where there is value in developing your own workflow and explorations.
muzani 7y ago
Article doesn't say anything new. It seems like a headline you send your boss because you want someone else to say the obvious.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That's what a lot of these articles - and a lot of consulting business - exist for. In environments with lots of internal politics, external validation is valuable for both credit and CYA reasons.
mrob 7y ago
I'd use every one of the buttons on that calculator. Admittedly I've never had need for gradians, but they're on the same button as degrees and radians, so it would still get pushed. For everyday use I use Qalculate!, and for more complicated calculations Maxima or LibreOffice Calc, all of which are far more advanced than a Sharp EL-501X. Dumbing down products makes them worse.
- daxterspeed 7y ago
  I think the scientific calculator could be an example of this principle on its own. It's often far more useful for a mathematician than struggling with the calculator app on a phone or booting up a clunky laptop. Ultimately I think the principle is flawed. The amount of features isn't an issue but rather whether each and every feature works well and adds to the value of the product. Eg. a scientific calculator would be an awful fit for a todo list application.
- the_jeremy 7y ago
  [Wabbitemu](http://wabbitemu.org/ http://wabbitemu.org/) makes a TI-83 emulator for Windows / Mac / Android. A simpler product might serve my needs, but this is one I've used for years and understand well (and works with existing hardware).
TeMPOraL 7y ago
This line of thinking is how we end up with a market of disposable, crappy toys satiating the immediate needs of "minimum viable users" but being incredibly wasteful over time. Out of the examples named: - Twitter - has plenty of features, and a larger ecosystem of additional features that, despite them trying their hardest, they didn't manage to kill. - Lyft - it's a meatspace service that's to some extent open-ended in terms of feature, but the app aspect itself is featureful compared to their simpler competitor: central dispatch taxi ordered through a phone call. - Venmo - can't comment on it, it doesn't seem to exist in my parts of the world. - Slack - it has lots and lots of features, constantly adds new ones, and it has a large ecosystem of integrations. Those features and integrations are a big reason Slack is adopted in organizations, over alternatives. If you want to compare it against a focused tool that does one thing and does it well, compare it against IRC. Great products do their primary use case well, but have high mastery ceiling - meaning there's potential to learn to use the tool better to achieve higher efficiency/productivity/satisfaction - and support interoperability, which means a bespoke set of features can be integrated by users who need it.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >If you want to compare it against a focused tool that does one thing and does it well, compare it against IRC. IRC hardly does what it does well.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    It does it well but it’s not simple to use. Which has now become one of its features.
  - spurdoman77 7y ago
    IRC vs slack is misguided comparison. Irc is protocol, slack is centralized service.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Still, if we just concentrate on a irc client implementation and ignore the service, it's the user experience we're comparing...
krm01 7y ago
Though the article doesn’t say anything new, it’s astonishing how hard it is for founders (especially of SaaS products) to actually do this. I run a UI/UX design firm that focusses on B2B SaaS products and the biggest difference I see between great and ok products is the founder’s a ability to accept simplification and focus. Feature creep sounds like you may be adding ‘more value to your end users’. In reality, you’re making your product more generic, less valuable, and slower in terms of helping the user get from point A to B.
nathan_f77 7y ago
This is very timely advice for me. It sounds very easy in theory, but in practice it's been very difficult when you have lots of customers and leads pulling you in many different directions. On the other hand, you can always have a distinction between products and companies. Especially when companies acquire other companies, just to add one more product to their portfolio (e.g. Google, Facebook.) So no-one is saying that a single company can't work on multiple products at the same time. Sometimes it's just not very obvious whether something should be a feature or a separate product with it's own brand, landing page, and pricing.
ThomPete 7y ago
Tell that to WeChat and a bunch of other Asian products. The idea of great products is kind of misguided. Talking about great products is something industry people do it's not something users of the product think about them. In other words, it's academically interesting but not useful to determine whether a product is actually successful which IMO is part of the greatness of a product.
lunchladydoris 7y ago
My iPhone is a great product because it does more. Great products don't have to be spartan. But in my experience they do seem to be intentional and value craftsmanship.
- lilgreenland 7y ago
  I would rather have fewer, but higher quality apps on my smart phone.
  - Hendrikto 7y ago
    I am not sure I see your point. You choose what apps you install, and you can uninstall bad ones.
    - oriolid 7y ago
      It is easier to develop high quality app for iOS than Android. With iOS, there are only relatively few different devices, they behave almost the same and most of the users are running up to date OS. On the other hand, there are too many Android devices to test your app with, many of them are buggy in unique ways (especially some models from Samsung and Huawei, and you can't ignore those because they have largest market shares), and on top of that manufacturers generally don't port new Android releases to old devices, so you have to support old APIs if you want to reach most Android users. Sometimes our users complain that we spend all of our resources supporting iOS, Windows and OS X and Android support is just a second thought. In reality we spend most of our time on Android and it's still the worst. Source: I develop a multiplatform audio app for living.
  - willis936 7y ago
    I’ve used both android (2010-2015) and iphone (2015-2019) and I have to say, android has higher quality apps. Apple’s walled garden is not preventing low effort, low quality apps from flooding the store. The more restrictive userspace APIs really hurt a lot of useful functionality and having to pay upfront to develop, let alone distribute apps deters many excellent softwares (talk to someone else about the wonders of FOSS). I would say you have to be more careful with android, but I’m not sure that’s really the case since apple store apps are very often “dangerous”.
andmarios 7y ago
That's good advice; if you are building a command-line tool for Unix. :) The thing is I can chain command-line tools using a pipe, embed them into scripts and more. I probably can't do that with your app. My guess is that great products are based around workflows rather than features. Have a vision, work towards it.
- GuB-42 7y ago
  And even with command line tools, a few extra features don't hurt. Going from GNU tools to the more barebone Unix stuff is often a pain. Things like no option for ls to sort by size, no "human readable" sizes, no recursive grep, etc... While some of these can be replaced by pipelines having a shortcut for common use cases is nice. An example is "tar xvzf file.tgz". The "z" option is just a shortcut for "gzip -cd file.tgz | tar xvf -", but most people are quite happy with this bloat.
rahimnathwani 7y ago
Many great products have many, many features. One of the examples given (Lyft) might appear simple on the surface, but think about the complexity behind just one element: the matching and routing for Lyft Line (similar to UberPool). Lyft has many, many engineers, and I'm pretty sure they're doing more than fixing bugs, dealing with infrastructure scaling etc. One thing great products do seem to have in common is that they are easy to use, in the sense that their UI has few elements, and much complexity is hidden from the user. This is similar to the concept of having APIs that are simple, but which are serviced by code that does a lot under the hood, hiding the complexity from the API consumer.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Other examples include AutoCAD, Photoshop, Premiere, Corel suite, Office (Word, Excel, Access). Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA. Eagle. VMWorks management suite. Visio, Rational Enterprise Architect. All of digital audio workstation products. Most video production applications. Heck, Windows and Mac OS. None of those cut features ever. This is why they're great, because you can do many things not possible otherwise, or hard and requiring hoops, with them. The UX is nicely layered and chunked to overwhelm less. (With some mistakes like lately seen in Windows 8 or 10.) Great products do more and better. None of these applications started small. They were only somewhat smaller from out and responded to feedback about additional features. Comparing tiny apps like Twitter or Slack to these is funny.
amelius 7y ago
Ok let's apply this to phones. How could a phone without a rich app ecosystem become "great"?
- julienreszka 7y ago
  Most people use less than 10 apps on their phone.
  - com2kid 7y ago
    And it is a different 10 for each person. And those 10 apps change over time. Heck I only use trip planning apps a couple times a year, but I wouldn't buy a phone that didn't allow me to use one at all.
- yunruse 7y ago
  It wouldn’t, because, I would argue, a modern phone serves as an API to apps, and all of its “features” are a necessity to facilitate its main feature, the apps it serves up. Some must be integrated to provide those APIs effectively (eg store, file storage), but the rest that are provided by default I would consider separate products, given that they are discrete, often easy to remove, and easily replaced by 3rd party apps.
magoon 7y ago
This is a religious debate. Some people are delighted by additional features, others by thoughtful design. It’s hard to see the other viewpoint and how this can be mutually exclusive.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > Some people are delighted by additional features, others by thoughtful design. UX designers in particular are delighted by thoughtful design. You want to avoid an "inmates running the asylum" kind of situation.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Some are delighted by fads like minimalism. You should keep those people as far from design as possible. Others prefer better looks over function. See above.
iagooar 7y ago
Nope. Only after our software reached a certain amount of features (compared to our competition, mainly) did we start to experience real growth. Our customers would not accept not having some features because the fewer features are so great. Nope. They need many features, and have complex workflows, that's how it goes. This doesn't mean that the features you offer shouldn't have a clear purpose and be easy to use.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  My experience is that who you're selling to matters a lot. In case of B2B, enterprises usually have tons of requirements and the approach of "less features but better" will not work: there's too much enterprise "cruft" that need to be implemented (e.g. SSO, audit logs, RBAC, etc) before they will even start considering you.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    ...which coincidentally is also where almost all the money is. The average computer user doesn't buy anything. They use whatever software they need for work (which is B2B by extension) and whatever came pre-installed on their machine. Even if you have a really simple app that's been designed to perfection and solves their exact problem, they will complain about paying more than a couple of dollars. Maybe if you have a "the user is the product" type of business, simple and focused is really the way to go. Otherwise, beware.
  - eitland 7y ago
    > there's too much enterprise "cruft" that need to be implemented (e.g. SSO, audit logs, RBAC, etc) before they will even start considering you. Calling SSO, audit logs and RBAC "cruft" in a business setting might not exactly inspire confidence in prospective customers.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      I think your parent poster's point is that SSO, audit logs, and RBAC aren't core product features. We could have a development team spend weeks on all of these, without implementing one feature that solves the core customer problem, that would get another business to use our product.
peter_retief 7y ago
Sounds easy but its really hard to do, and yes I agree with the concept
Hendrikto 7y ago
The article contains an image of a (relatively basic) calculator, asking the question: "How many of these buttons will you really push?" Well… all of them. I may not need tan every day, but when I do, I need it to be there.
- jeswin 7y ago
  I skimmed the article and closed it when I saw the Scientific Calculator being shown as an example of complexity. Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. Not everything is a todo list app with rounded corners.
  - Damogran6 7y ago
    I hope you didn't miss the overall message for one poorly articulated example, then. Because there was an informative point put forth.
    - mosselman 7y ago
      There might have been, but not a very original one at that. Why waste your time on an article written by someone who doesn't grasp the material fully?
    - rq1 7y ago
      This example made the point unbeknownst to the author. This Dieter Rams mantra is a recurring theme. What do you think about cockpits interfaces and Bloomberg terminals? Should we add some more “white spaces”? Prioritising information/functionality does not mean sacrificing their density.
      - Damogran6 7y ago
        I think some things can be easy and some things must trade low learning curve for functionality. I highly doubt Airbus will produce a commercial airliner with a big red “fly to destination” button. (Though I’ve been wrong before)
sbmthakur 7y ago
Google Search is a good example of this. But this isn't always true. WeChat and Facebook can be considered as counter examples.
- arendtio 7y ago
  Nowadays, I come to think of it as 'Google Search' was a good example. Back in the nineties, it was a very simple page, but today, there is all sort of clutter on that page. It starts with the privacy layers, goes on with the location bar (plus other bars) and goes on with all those boxes in the results (not even talking about ads). I mean, yes, some are truly valuable, but somehow the page doesn't feel as clean anymore as it used to be.
nadam 7y ago
This tends to be true in case of consumer products and tend to be not true in case of professional products. Google search is simple, Google AdWords is not, and never was. You cannot create a professional 3D modeling software, photo editing software, IDE, video editing software without starting relatively complex. Professionals need to use quite a lot of sophisticated features to be productive. The learning curve is less of a concern in a professional setting. (I kind of know it because I have been working on a VR 3D modeler for a while. To create a professional-grade software the barrier to entry is quite high, so small developers try to create simple-to-use consumer, hobby-ist, products. I am creating a hobby-ist product, which is already much more complex than a consumer product.) If you look at reviews of the smaller products, the overwhelming majority of criticism is lack of features.
everyone 7y ago
I recently wrote this to someone who was thinking of learning Pico-8 (a very minimal game engine) I was saying they should just learn Unity instead. ... Something like Pico-8 reminds me of a program from my days as an architect. Sketchup, it was a very intuitive 3d modelling program aimed at architects, it was very easy to learn, but once you've got the hang of it you start running into all sorts of limitations, like the initially lovely UI becomes a total mess when u have a big and / or complex model, it performs really bad, it cant do proper renders at all, and so on. In the end, after struggling with Sketchups limitations I just learned 3DSmax It could do everything Sketchup could do + soooooo much more, the learning curve was much steeper at the very start, but afterwards, working with it was much easier and faster, and allowed me to do a lot more. I would have been much better off if I had started with 3DSMAX, as opposed to wasting time struggling with Sketchup trying to get it to do stuff it couldnt.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > Sketchup ... was a very intuitive 3d modelling program aimed at architects, it was very easy to learn, but once you've got the hang of it you start running into all sorts of limitations I'm not sure Sketchup was really aimed at architects. Few real licensed architect rely on Sketchup (although they may use it occasionally). It's a great piece of software to get the uninitiated into modeling (it worked for you) and it can handle many non-professional tasks pretty well (e.g., light home renovation). Also (and this is big) sketchup is free. The professional tools cost thousands a year, if I remember correctly 3DSMax is ~$400/month. No 3D modeling newbie is going to drop that cash just to get their feet wet with the profession. Sketchup is not the end-all, but it has its place. And lets take the analogy further: easy-to-use starter kits in every field are incredibly helpful. They allow you to learn a field without a huge commitment and then to decide whether you want to invest more of your time. If someone did indeed start with 3DSMax without using sketchup, there's a strong likelihood that they'd get frustrated and give up. More generally, if you have to tackle a difficult problem, start small and break off a piece rather than trying to conquer the whole.
  - everyone 7y ago
    It definitely was aimed at architects (among others) when it came out in 2000. I had just started architecture college then, we did everything on paper, I only learned Autocad during my 1st summer job. 'Computers' were more the realm of architectural technicians back then, I didnt know any architects who could use any 3d modelling software at all. Architects were generally quite computer illiterate, Sketchup was a program simple enough for a computer illiterate person to begin using. Also quote from wikipedia about its intended purpose. " SketchUp debuted in August 2000 as a general-purpose 3D content creation tool and was envisioned as a software program "that would allow design professionals to draw the way they want by emulating the feel and freedom of working with pen and paper in a simple and elegant interface, that would be fun to use and easy to learn and that would be used by designers to play with their designs in a way that is not possible with traditional design software. It also has user friendly buttons to make it easier to use." "
cousin_it 7y ago
Counterpoint: Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth" from 2001. > Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
- mromanuk 7y ago
  Following that example, looks like there is no minimalist general case, but should be possible to achieve a minimal product for journalist, taking into account what they need. By further extending this logic, would be possible to arrange different sets of minimal features for every type of users, or at least cover a majority of those user cases and not force a one size-fits-all approach.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Except it’s much easier to learn how to ignore all the features you don’t necessarily need, than to start learning a completely new product every time one of the features you need isn’t in the one you’re currently using.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      On that matter, it should be possible to re-package the same product but with different UI configurations. I am pretty sure modern IDEs are quite configurable. Why not word processors?
austincheney 7y ago
Unfortunate. So many of the comments here seem to miss the point and this is a theme I have noticed through my career as a developer. Yes, every button on a calculator is eventually needed by someone as are every optional concern in every application, but every optional concern is not needed by everybody and certainly not frequently. Selectivity of desired features is a bias. The inability to account for bias in product design makes for shitty products that are either excessively complex or excessively expensive. All terrain tires that are extremely safe for driving in snow are great, but I don’t need that living where I do since it almost never snows here. It is an unnecessary excess that I certainly would not want to pay for. For me this is no different than the tan button of a calculator which I have also never needed. The inability to perceive or account for bias, as evidenced by the comments here, are why many employers are hesitant to elevate developers to product management positions, which is another form of selective bias.
arendtio 7y ago
> The ones you use everyday, as a customer. Twitter, Lyft, Venmo, Slack. Somehow I am living in a different world. I don't use any of those services on a daily basis. Actually, Twitter is the only one I come across sometimes when someone links/embeds some tweet.
Geee 7y ago
Great products appear to do less. Products should be composed in a way that allows them to do more while appearing to do less.
indymike 7y ago
Hmm. So the device in your pocket that replaces a cell phone,radio,camera,flashlight,computer,pager calculator,day timer, music player and more is not the perfect counter example?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Actually, I don't think that it is, as it does few of those things particularly well. In fact, this is a large part of why I've decided to stop using smartphones and to start carrying both a feature phone and a handheld computer instead.
garganzol 7y ago
If you don't mind, here is my personal angle: "In reality, great products do a whole lot, while providing a helpful, intuitive and somewhat shy interface. In this way, they allow to achieve solid results for complex problems in no time. Customers who are lucky enough to interact with such product at least once in their life often describe it as being simple and even magical. But do not let this fool you. Simplicity and magic do not equal to the lack of functions or settings. Great products get the job done. They do it in timely fashion. They do not brag. They do not ask you to sign in. The do not put you through myriads of advertising. They do not overcast nor crash customers' lives by their own egos. They just work."
andai 7y ago
Has anyone used Notational Velocity / nvAlt? I've been reading about it all day (longingly -- sold my Mac a while back), and that's why this headline jumped out at me. I have tried dozens of apps and haven't found anything that even comes close.
huhtenberg 7y ago
A more accurate statement would've been - Solving fewer problems, better makes for a great product. There are more ways to make a great product. This is just one of them.
teddyh 7y ago
I think bad products do either too few things adequately or many things badly. Good products either do a few things well or many things adequately. Great products, on the other hand, do many things well, by appearing to do fewer things. Additional features are designed, in great products, to be discovered as you need them.
madiathomas 7y ago
Me: "I am selling this product that does X very well" Prospect: "Does it do Y and Z?. If it can do Y and Z, I will buy it" Y and Z is different for each and every client. That's how products becomes bloated. It is demand from real world clients that demands features to be added before they can buy your product.
makach 7y ago
Wow, is it enough to read the title?
ken 7y ago
As examples of this thesis, apparently, it shows photographs of a camera flash, a bookshelf radio, a turntable, and a pocket calculator. Yow. How many people have used any of those standalone devices in the past 10 years? How many of you have used, in the past 10 minutes, any of those as a feature of a single device that includes all of these? I rest my case. The 1968 Braun catalog may end up in an industrial design museum for its beauty, but people aren't buying products like that for their beauty today, any more than they're buying 1968 sports cars. People open their wallet for features.
- deleted 7y ago
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BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
This might be a bit of professional bias on my part but I like to think of product-market fit using ideas inspired by information theoretic model-data fit: Low resolution fit: The product vaguely and simply fits its market. High resolution fit: The product is complex and is tightly tailored to the market. Overfit: The product is so tightly tailored to some users that it only fits well a small part of the market. Underfit: The product is so generic that it's easy to copy or is missing important features. Then it becomes about trying to achieve optimal fit. It's almost a bayesian thing in my mind. You want a product or platform that is not overfitted, not underfitted, high resolution where it needs to be, low resolution otherwise. There is one more dimension I find useful which I will call "crossfit" because it is inspired from the concepts of cross entropy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_entropy) or KL divergence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_divergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_diver...). Having bad crossfit means that the product fit is biased in some suboptimal way. It might fit a side market of a greater market, it might focus on aspects that would be more important in another market or it might use a design language that is better tailored to different users. Having bad crossfit often happens when product teams with expertise in one domain apply their knowledge to a second domain without being sufficiently familiar with the differences. Without taking into account differences in key details of the new domain, without learning the new lingo or without properly weighting the different levels of importance of challenges, product fit tends to end up not quite right. An extreme but common example is that of software developers (like myself) designing interfaces that are very difficult to use for anyone but other software developers. However, it can also happen in subtler ways even for experienced product designers when they jump into a new field they are not very familiar with. Having good crossfit is about learning to speak the language of your users.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  This is a pretty interesting view, probably could be operationalized for web sites and apps with analytics data.
deleted 7y ago
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davidajackson 7y ago
There is a notion of feature death with products but to improve retention you do need to keep shipping out new features so I disagree here. It feels like this article is piggybacking off the minimalism advocated in design schools. Minimalism is not the same thing as throwing out or ignoring features. How does the author reconcile their thesis with the fact that they're suggesting ignoring customer suggestions? The attitude of if it ain't broke don't fix it is really you asking to be crushed by a competitor. This said, the caveat here is when it comes to ideas. Better approaches to solving a problem are often simpler or more elegant, and require an out-of-the-box approach.
meerita 7y ago
This article was written with full fallacies. One example of this logical fallacy is because it doesn't count that features are done based on KPI. It's not about adding nonsensical features, it's about to increase KPIs, therefore, make even more business. Also, this rule doesn't apply to all products, so it's a fallacy. People who downvote this just doesn't understand or never carried a business seriously. They're just hedonists on design. That's all.

The pictured sharp calculator made me rage at the state of modern desktop calculators in most OS’s. The other day I needed atan (inverse tan) and found the built in windows/osx calculators do not support this function. Google for web calculator, nothing. In the end I hacked up a quick c based program. A 40 year old calculator with a 4004 or 6502 CPU can do more than default desktop applications. Removing features can eliminate a customer or two.

altano 7y ago
First google result for "windows calculator atan": https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3kb0n1/how_to_do_inverse_functions_with_the_new/cuw55jz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3kb0n1/how_to_do...
- masklinn 7y ago
  Pretty similarly, OSX's calculator (at least in 10.11) has a "2nd" / shifted layout with inverses:https://imgur.com/a/xFUKxwP https://imgur.com/a/xFUKxwP
Damogran6 7y ago
Turning the iPhone calculator sideways reveals a scientific calc layout, including tanh Unfortunately feature bloat on a simple device often results in making things no longer easily discoverable. (I'm looking at you, force touch.)
- masklinn 7y ago
  tanh and arctan are different functions.
  - didgeoridoo 7y ago
    To get to inverse tan, you need to hit the “2nd” toggle on the far left. (So yes, you need to turn your phone sideways and tap a poorly-marked and unexplained toggle button that looks like every other button on the screen.)
    - Damogran6 7y ago
      And everyone else uses ‘inv’ instead of 2nd.
      - jimktrains2 7y ago
        That's not true at all. The ti30 and relatives are arguably one of the most well known scientific calculators in the world, and it uses 2nd. http://i.ebayimg.com/00/$T2eC16FHJH4FHejHUSZ3BSB3Dzh6%20g~~_32.JPG http://i.ebayimg.com/00/$T2eC16FHJH4FHejHUSZ3BSB3Dzh6%20g~~_... The hp35 and relatives use an upper and lower "shift" button to access the inverse trig functions. http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/251900074306-0-1/s-l1000.jpg http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/251900074306-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
      - masklinn 7y ago
        « 2nd » is the toggle for the alternate calculator layout (which has all the inverse functions). The key on that alternate layout is tan^-1.
willis936 7y ago
Are you sure? I haven’t seen a windows calculator that didn’t have that feature since before I learned trig. Were you using the scientific calculator layout and the shift/2nd key?
jimktrains2 7y ago
Both Mac and window have scientific mode. https://support.apple.com/guide/calculator/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/calculator/welcome/mac https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4039496/windows-10-scientific-calculator https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4039496/windows-10-... There is also bc, that macos should have by default. https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/ https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/
- jaifraic 7y ago
  Having used bc as my calculator for a while, i recently switched to insect - because it has fore features. For example it can parse and convert between physical units and has a lot of predefined constants. So instead of using two command line tools (bc to calculate, units to convert) i just use insect. https://github.com/sharkdp/insect https://github.com/sharkdp/insect There is a web version available as well: https://insect.sh https://insect.sh
deleted 7y ago
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pvorb 7y ago
WolframAlpha is still around, no?
mark-r 7y ago
I use Python as my desktop calculator.
huhtenberg 7y ago
> built in windows calculator Alt-2 (for Scientific mode), Inv, Tan
jacobolus 7y ago
> windows/osx calculators do not support this First of all, the default OS X and Windows calculators both do support this feature. But that’s not really the easy way to approach this type of problem. On OS X, first do command-space (to bring up the floating “spotlight” bar), then type e.g. atan(1), and it reveals the answer rounded to 10 digits, 0.7853981634 To get 20 digits, open up a terminal window, and type: bc -l <<< "a(1)" Or use your favorite scripting language... > Google for web calculator, nothing Type atan(1) into google and it prints the answer. Or open up the JavaScript console on this forum page (or any other web page) and type Math.atan(1) to get the answer to 16 digits 0.7853981633974483 Alternately, try https://www.wolframalpha.com/ https://www.wolframalpha.com/ for more complicated calculations. > default desktop [calculator] applications Imitating the buttons of a handheld electronic calculator on a computer with a full keyboard is anachronistic and cumbersome. Stop using those, even when they do include the specific functions you want.
kps 7y ago
> Google for web calculator, nothing. https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42) https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42) https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42)+in+degrees https://www.google.com/search?q=atan(42)+in+degrees (Personally, I usually do quick-and-dirty arithmetic directly in the shell, as ksh expressions include floating point. echo $((atan(42))) )

deleted 7y ago

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gridlockd 7y ago

"Less features make my job easier, so please have less features" - UX designers reluctant to solve the problem they were hired to solve Well, duh. Developers can relate, short programs are exponentially easier to write well than large ones. That's the challenge. > Think about the most successful products you know. The ones you use everyday, as a customer. Twitter, Lyft, Venmo, Slack. I wouldn't think of these products and I don't use them every day. I would think of very complex applications with an incredible amount of features that I'll mostly never use. However, this large surface area overlaps with what I need. There is no "more focused" app that does the job. I would also think of the top software companies - Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM. None of these companies are known for their "simple and focused" applications. Quite the contrary. Sure, if you have a little app that's just a frontend for one thing, keep the focus. Otherwise, keep in mind that "it doesn't do the one thing we need" is generally a deal-breaker, whereas "it does one-hundred things we don't need" is not. Everyone's needs are slightly different and critical mass is important.

meerita 7y ago

Fallacy.

treggle 7y ago

This is an overly broad generalization. Computer software products can and should come in all sizes and flavors and designs. This is the most powerful and flexible machine invented. You can’t say the software that runs in them should be like this or like that. What you can say is some products do well by being simple.

deltron3030 7y ago
It's likely true in their own bubble of small business apps on Product Hunt where performance is mostly measured in time savings and the simplification of processes. But this doesn't hold for more creative applications that are more like games, where the time spend doing a task is time that is regarded as time well spend, where there is value in developing your own workflow and explorations.

muzani 7y ago

Article doesn't say anything new. It seems like a headline you send your boss because you want someone else to say the obvious.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
That's what a lot of these articles - and a lot of consulting business - exist for. In environments with lots of internal politics, external validation is valuable for both credit and CYA reasons.

mrob 7y ago

I'd use every one of the buttons on that calculator. Admittedly I've never had need for gradians, but they're on the same button as degrees and radians, so it would still get pushed. For everyday use I use Qalculate!, and for more complicated calculations Maxima or LibreOffice Calc, all of which are far more advanced than a Sharp EL-501X. Dumbing down products makes them worse.

daxterspeed 7y ago
I think the scientific calculator could be an example of this principle on its own. It's often far more useful for a mathematician than struggling with the calculator app on a phone or booting up a clunky laptop. Ultimately I think the principle is flawed. The amount of features isn't an issue but rather whether each and every feature works well and adds to the value of the product. Eg. a scientific calculator would be an awful fit for a todo list application.
the_jeremy 7y ago
[Wabbitemu](http://wabbitemu.org/ http://wabbitemu.org/) makes a TI-83 emulator for Windows / Mac / Android. A simpler product might serve my needs, but this is one I've used for years and understand well (and works with existing hardware).

TeMPOraL 7y ago

This line of thinking is how we end up with a market of disposable, crappy toys satiating the immediate needs of "minimum viable users" but being incredibly wasteful over time. Out of the examples named: - Twitter - has plenty of features, and a larger ecosystem of additional features that, despite them trying their hardest, they didn't manage to kill. - Lyft - it's a meatspace service that's to some extent open-ended in terms of feature, but the app aspect itself is featureful compared to their simpler competitor: central dispatch taxi ordered through a phone call. - Venmo - can't comment on it, it doesn't seem to exist in my parts of the world. - Slack - it has lots and lots of features, constantly adds new ones, and it has a large ecosystem of integrations. Those features and integrations are a big reason Slack is adopted in organizations, over alternatives. If you want to compare it against a focused tool that does one thing and does it well, compare it against IRC. Great products do their primary use case well, but have high mastery ceiling - meaning there's potential to learn to use the tool better to achieve higher efficiency/productivity/satisfaction - and support interoperability, which means a bespoke set of features can be integrated by users who need it.

coldtea 7y ago
>If you want to compare it against a focused tool that does one thing and does it well, compare it against IRC. IRC hardly does what it does well.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  It does it well but it’s not simple to use. Which has now become one of its features.
- spurdoman77 7y ago
  IRC vs slack is misguided comparison. Irc is protocol, slack is centralized service.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Still, if we just concentrate on a irc client implementation and ignore the service, it's the user experience we're comparing...

krm01 7y ago

Though the article doesn’t say anything new, it’s astonishing how hard it is for founders (especially of SaaS products) to actually do this. I run a UI/UX design firm that focusses on B2B SaaS products and the biggest difference I see between great and ok products is the founder’s a ability to accept simplification and focus. Feature creep sounds like you may be adding ‘more value to your end users’. In reality, you’re making your product more generic, less valuable, and slower in terms of helping the user get from point A to B.

nathan_f77 7y ago

This is very timely advice for me. It sounds very easy in theory, but in practice it's been very difficult when you have lots of customers and leads pulling you in many different directions. On the other hand, you can always have a distinction between products and companies. Especially when companies acquire other companies, just to add one more product to their portfolio (e.g. Google, Facebook.) So no-one is saying that a single company can't work on multiple products at the same time. Sometimes it's just not very obvious whether something should be a feature or a separate product with it's own brand, landing page, and pricing.

ThomPete 7y ago

Tell that to WeChat and a bunch of other Asian products. The idea of great products is kind of misguided. Talking about great products is something industry people do it's not something users of the product think about them. In other words, it's academically interesting but not useful to determine whether a product is actually successful which IMO is part of the greatness of a product.

lunchladydoris 7y ago

My iPhone is a great product because it does more. Great products don't have to be spartan. But in my experience they do seem to be intentional and value craftsmanship.

lilgreenland 7y ago
I would rather have fewer, but higher quality apps on my smart phone.
- Hendrikto 7y ago
  I am not sure I see your point. You choose what apps you install, and you can uninstall bad ones.
  - oriolid 7y ago
    It is easier to develop high quality app for iOS than Android. With iOS, there are only relatively few different devices, they behave almost the same and most of the users are running up to date OS. On the other hand, there are too many Android devices to test your app with, many of them are buggy in unique ways (especially some models from Samsung and Huawei, and you can't ignore those because they have largest market shares), and on top of that manufacturers generally don't port new Android releases to old devices, so you have to support old APIs if you want to reach most Android users. Sometimes our users complain that we spend all of our resources supporting iOS, Windows and OS X and Android support is just a second thought. In reality we spend most of our time on Android and it's still the worst. Source: I develop a multiplatform audio app for living.
- willis936 7y ago
  I’ve used both android (2010-2015) and iphone (2015-2019) and I have to say, android has higher quality apps. Apple’s walled garden is not preventing low effort, low quality apps from flooding the store. The more restrictive userspace APIs really hurt a lot of useful functionality and having to pay upfront to develop, let alone distribute apps deters many excellent softwares (talk to someone else about the wonders of FOSS). I would say you have to be more careful with android, but I’m not sure that’s really the case since apple store apps are very often “dangerous”.

andmarios 7y ago

That's good advice; if you are building a command-line tool for Unix. :) The thing is I can chain command-line tools using a pipe, embed them into scripts and more. I probably can't do that with your app. My guess is that great products are based around workflows rather than features. Have a vision, work towards it.

GuB-42 7y ago
And even with command line tools, a few extra features don't hurt. Going from GNU tools to the more barebone Unix stuff is often a pain. Things like no option for ls to sort by size, no "human readable" sizes, no recursive grep, etc... While some of these can be replaced by pipelines having a shortcut for common use cases is nice. An example is "tar xvzf file.tgz". The "z" option is just a shortcut for "gzip -cd file.tgz | tar xvf -", but most people are quite happy with this bloat.

rahimnathwani 7y ago

Many great products have many, many features. One of the examples given (Lyft) might appear simple on the surface, but think about the complexity behind just one element: the matching and routing for Lyft Line (similar to UberPool). Lyft has many, many engineers, and I'm pretty sure they're doing more than fixing bugs, dealing with infrastructure scaling etc. One thing great products do seem to have in common is that they are easy to use, in the sense that their UI has few elements, and much complexity is hidden from the user. This is similar to the concept of having APIs that are simple, but which are serviced by code that does a lot under the hood, hiding the complexity from the API consumer.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Other examples include AutoCAD, Photoshop, Premiere, Corel suite, Office (Word, Excel, Access). Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA. Eagle. VMWorks management suite. Visio, Rational Enterprise Architect. All of digital audio workstation products. Most video production applications. Heck, Windows and Mac OS. None of those cut features ever. This is why they're great, because you can do many things not possible otherwise, or hard and requiring hoops, with them. The UX is nicely layered and chunked to overwhelm less. (With some mistakes like lately seen in Windows 8 or 10.) Great products do more and better. None of these applications started small. They were only somewhat smaller from out and responded to feedback about additional features. Comparing tiny apps like Twitter or Slack to these is funny.

amelius 7y ago

Ok let's apply this to phones. How could a phone without a rich app ecosystem become "great"?

julienreszka 7y ago
Most people use less than 10 apps on their phone.
- com2kid 7y ago
  And it is a different 10 for each person. And those 10 apps change over time. Heck I only use trip planning apps a couple times a year, but I wouldn't buy a phone that didn't allow me to use one at all.
yunruse 7y ago
It wouldn’t, because, I would argue, a modern phone serves as an API to apps, and all of its “features” are a necessity to facilitate its main feature, the apps it serves up. Some must be integrated to provide those APIs effectively (eg store, file storage), but the rest that are provided by default I would consider separate products, given that they are discrete, often easy to remove, and easily replaced by 3rd party apps.

magoon 7y ago

This is a religious debate. Some people are delighted by additional features, others by thoughtful design. It’s hard to see the other viewpoint and how this can be mutually exclusive.

gridlockd 7y ago
> Some people are delighted by additional features, others by thoughtful design. UX designers in particular are delighted by thoughtful design. You want to avoid an "inmates running the asylum" kind of situation.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Some are delighted by fads like minimalism. You should keep those people as far from design as possible. Others prefer better looks over function. See above.

iagooar 7y ago

Nope. Only after our software reached a certain amount of features (compared to our competition, mainly) did we start to experience real growth. Our customers would not accept not having some features because the fewer features are so great. Nope. They need many features, and have complex workflows, that's how it goes. This doesn't mean that the features you offer shouldn't have a clear purpose and be easy to use.

stingraycharles 7y ago
My experience is that who you're selling to matters a lot. In case of B2B, enterprises usually have tons of requirements and the approach of "less features but better" will not work: there's too much enterprise "cruft" that need to be implemented (e.g. SSO, audit logs, RBAC, etc) before they will even start considering you.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  ...which coincidentally is also where almost all the money is. The average computer user doesn't buy anything. They use whatever software they need for work (which is B2B by extension) and whatever came pre-installed on their machine. Even if you have a really simple app that's been designed to perfection and solves their exact problem, they will complain about paying more than a couple of dollars. Maybe if you have a "the user is the product" type of business, simple and focused is really the way to go. Otherwise, beware.
- eitland 7y ago
  > there's too much enterprise "cruft" that need to be implemented (e.g. SSO, audit logs, RBAC, etc) before they will even start considering you. Calling SSO, audit logs and RBAC "cruft" in a business setting might not exactly inspire confidence in prospective customers.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    I think your parent poster's point is that SSO, audit logs, and RBAC aren't core product features. We could have a development team spend weeks on all of these, without implementing one feature that solves the core customer problem, that would get another business to use our product.

peter_retief 7y ago

Sounds easy but its really hard to do, and yes I agree with the concept

Hendrikto 7y ago

The article contains an image of a (relatively basic) calculator, asking the question: "How many of these buttons will you really push?" Well… all of them. I may not need tan every day, but when I do, I need it to be there.

jeswin 7y ago
I skimmed the article and closed it when I saw the Scientific Calculator being shown as an example of complexity. Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. Not everything is a todo list app with rounded corners.
- Damogran6 7y ago
  I hope you didn't miss the overall message for one poorly articulated example, then. Because there was an informative point put forth.
  - mosselman 7y ago
    There might have been, but not a very original one at that. Why waste your time on an article written by someone who doesn't grasp the material fully?
  - rq1 7y ago
    This example made the point unbeknownst to the author. This Dieter Rams mantra is a recurring theme. What do you think about cockpits interfaces and Bloomberg terminals? Should we add some more “white spaces”? Prioritising information/functionality does not mean sacrificing their density.
    - Damogran6 7y ago
      I think some things can be easy and some things must trade low learning curve for functionality. I highly doubt Airbus will produce a commercial airliner with a big red “fly to destination” button. (Though I’ve been wrong before)

sbmthakur 7y ago

Google Search is a good example of this. But this isn't always true. WeChat and Facebook can be considered as counter examples.

arendtio 7y ago
Nowadays, I come to think of it as 'Google Search' was a good example. Back in the nineties, it was a very simple page, but today, there is all sort of clutter on that page. It starts with the privacy layers, goes on with the location bar (plus other bars) and goes on with all those boxes in the results (not even talking about ads). I mean, yes, some are truly valuable, but somehow the page doesn't feel as clean anymore as it used to be.

nadam 7y ago

This tends to be true in case of consumer products and tend to be not true in case of professional products. Google search is simple, Google AdWords is not, and never was. You cannot create a professional 3D modeling software, photo editing software, IDE, video editing software without starting relatively complex. Professionals need to use quite a lot of sophisticated features to be productive. The learning curve is less of a concern in a professional setting. (I kind of know it because I have been working on a VR 3D modeler for a while. To create a professional-grade software the barrier to entry is quite high, so small developers try to create simple-to-use consumer, hobby-ist, products. I am creating a hobby-ist product, which is already much more complex than a consumer product.) If you look at reviews of the smaller products, the overwhelming majority of criticism is lack of features.

everyone 7y ago

I recently wrote this to someone who was thinking of learning Pico-8 (a very minimal game engine) I was saying they should just learn Unity instead. ... Something like Pico-8 reminds me of a program from my days as an architect. Sketchup, it was a very intuitive 3d modelling program aimed at architects, it was very easy to learn, but once you've got the hang of it you start running into all sorts of limitations, like the initially lovely UI becomes a total mess when u have a big and / or complex model, it performs really bad, it cant do proper renders at all, and so on. In the end, after struggling with Sketchups limitations I just learned 3DSmax It could do everything Sketchup could do + soooooo much more, the learning curve was much steeper at the very start, but afterwards, working with it was much easier and faster, and allowed me to do a lot more. I would have been much better off if I had started with 3DSMAX, as opposed to wasting time struggling with Sketchup trying to get it to do stuff it couldnt.

speedplane 7y ago
> Sketchup ... was a very intuitive 3d modelling program aimed at architects, it was very easy to learn, but once you've got the hang of it you start running into all sorts of limitations I'm not sure Sketchup was really aimed at architects. Few real licensed architect rely on Sketchup (although they may use it occasionally). It's a great piece of software to get the uninitiated into modeling (it worked for you) and it can handle many non-professional tasks pretty well (e.g., light home renovation). Also (and this is big) sketchup is free. The professional tools cost thousands a year, if I remember correctly 3DSMax is ~$400/month. No 3D modeling newbie is going to drop that cash just to get their feet wet with the profession. Sketchup is not the end-all, but it has its place. And lets take the analogy further: easy-to-use starter kits in every field are incredibly helpful. They allow you to learn a field without a huge commitment and then to decide whether you want to invest more of your time. If someone did indeed start with 3DSMax without using sketchup, there's a strong likelihood that they'd get frustrated and give up. More generally, if you have to tackle a difficult problem, start small and break off a piece rather than trying to conquer the whole.
- everyone 7y ago
  It definitely was aimed at architects (among others) when it came out in 2000. I had just started architecture college then, we did everything on paper, I only learned Autocad during my 1st summer job. 'Computers' were more the realm of architectural technicians back then, I didnt know any architects who could use any 3d modelling software at all. Architects were generally quite computer illiterate, Sketchup was a program simple enough for a computer illiterate person to begin using. Also quote from wikipedia about its intended purpose. " SketchUp debuted in August 2000 as a general-purpose 3D content creation tool and was envisioned as a software program "that would allow design professionals to draw the way they want by emulating the feel and freedom of working with pen and paper in a simple and elegant interface, that would be fun to use and easy to learn and that would be used by designers to play with their designs in a way that is not possible with traditional design software. It also has user friendly buttons to make it easier to use." "

cousin_it 7y ago

Counterpoint: Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth" from 2001. > Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

mromanuk 7y ago
Following that example, looks like there is no minimalist general case, but should be possible to achieve a minimal product for journalist, taking into account what they need. By further extending this logic, would be possible to arrange different sets of minimal features for every type of users, or at least cover a majority of those user cases and not force a one size-fits-all approach.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Except it’s much easier to learn how to ignore all the features you don’t necessarily need, than to start learning a completely new product every time one of the features you need isn’t in the one you’re currently using.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    On that matter, it should be possible to re-package the same product but with different UI configurations. I am pretty sure modern IDEs are quite configurable. Why not word processors?

austincheney 7y ago

Unfortunate. So many of the comments here seem to miss the point and this is a theme I have noticed through my career as a developer. Yes, every button on a calculator is eventually needed by someone as are every optional concern in every application, but every optional concern is not needed by everybody and certainly not frequently. Selectivity of desired features is a bias. The inability to account for bias in product design makes for shitty products that are either excessively complex or excessively expensive. All terrain tires that are extremely safe for driving in snow are great, but I don’t need that living where I do since it almost never snows here. It is an unnecessary excess that I certainly would not want to pay for. For me this is no different than the tan button of a calculator which I have also never needed. The inability to perceive or account for bias, as evidenced by the comments here, are why many employers are hesitant to elevate developers to product management positions, which is another form of selective bias.

arendtio 7y ago

> The ones you use everyday, as a customer. Twitter, Lyft, Venmo, Slack. Somehow I am living in a different world. I don't use any of those services on a daily basis. Actually, Twitter is the only one I come across sometimes when someone links/embeds some tweet.

Geee 7y ago

Great products appear to do less. Products should be composed in a way that allows them to do more while appearing to do less.

indymike 7y ago

Hmm. So the device in your pocket that replaces a cell phone,radio,camera,flashlight,computer,pager calculator,day timer, music player and more is not the perfect counter example?

JohnFen 7y ago
Actually, I don't think that it is, as it does few of those things particularly well. In fact, this is a large part of why I've decided to stop using smartphones and to start carrying both a feature phone and a handheld computer instead.

garganzol 7y ago

If you don't mind, here is my personal angle: "In reality, great products do a whole lot, while providing a helpful, intuitive and somewhat shy interface. In this way, they allow to achieve solid results for complex problems in no time. Customers who are lucky enough to interact with such product at least once in their life often describe it as being simple and even magical. But do not let this fool you. Simplicity and magic do not equal to the lack of functions or settings. Great products get the job done. They do it in timely fashion. They do not brag. They do not ask you to sign in. The do not put you through myriads of advertising. They do not overcast nor crash customers' lives by their own egos. They just work."

andai 7y ago

Has anyone used Notational Velocity / nvAlt? I've been reading about it all day (longingly -- sold my Mac a while back), and that's why this headline jumped out at me. I have tried dozens of apps and haven't found anything that even comes close.

huhtenberg 7y ago

A more accurate statement would've been - Solving fewer problems, better makes for a great product. There are more ways to make a great product. This is just one of them.

teddyh 7y ago

I think bad products do either too few things adequately or many things badly. Good products either do a few things well or many things adequately. Great products, on the other hand, do many things well, by appearing to do fewer things. Additional features are designed, in great products, to be discovered as you need them.

madiathomas 7y ago

Me: "I am selling this product that does X very well" Prospect: "Does it do Y and Z?. If it can do Y and Z, I will buy it" Y and Z is different for each and every client. That's how products becomes bloated. It is demand from real world clients that demands features to be added before they can buy your product.

makach 7y ago

Wow, is it enough to read the title?

ken 7y ago

As examples of this thesis, apparently, it shows photographs of a camera flash, a bookshelf radio, a turntable, and a pocket calculator. Yow. How many people have used any of those standalone devices in the past 10 years? How many of you have used, in the past 10 minutes, any of those as a feature of a single device that includes all of these? I rest my case. The 1968 Braun catalog may end up in an industrial design museum for its beauty, but people aren't buying products like that for their beauty today, any more than they're buying 1968 sports cars. People open their wallet for features.

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BenoitEssiambre 7y ago

This might be a bit of professional bias on my part but I like to think of product-market fit using ideas inspired by information theoretic model-data fit: Low resolution fit: The product vaguely and simply fits its market. High resolution fit: The product is complex and is tightly tailored to the market. Overfit: The product is so tightly tailored to some users that it only fits well a small part of the market. Underfit: The product is so generic that it's easy to copy or is missing important features. Then it becomes about trying to achieve optimal fit. It's almost a bayesian thing in my mind. You want a product or platform that is not overfitted, not underfitted, high resolution where it needs to be, low resolution otherwise. There is one more dimension I find useful which I will call "crossfit" because it is inspired from the concepts of cross entropy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_entropy) or KL divergence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_divergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_diver...). Having bad crossfit means that the product fit is biased in some suboptimal way. It might fit a side market of a greater market, it might focus on aspects that would be more important in another market or it might use a design language that is better tailored to different users. Having bad crossfit often happens when product teams with expertise in one domain apply their knowledge to a second domain without being sufficiently familiar with the differences. Without taking into account differences in key details of the new domain, without learning the new lingo or without properly weighting the different levels of importance of challenges, product fit tends to end up not quite right. An extreme but common example is that of software developers (like myself) designing interfaces that are very difficult to use for anyone but other software developers. However, it can also happen in subtler ways even for experienced product designers when they jump into a new field they are not very familiar with. Having good crossfit is about learning to speak the language of your users.

marmaduke 7y ago
This is a pretty interesting view, probably could be operationalized for web sites and apps with analytics data.

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davidajackson 7y ago

There is a notion of feature death with products but to improve retention you do need to keep shipping out new features so I disagree here. It feels like this article is piggybacking off the minimalism advocated in design schools. Minimalism is not the same thing as throwing out or ignoring features. How does the author reconcile their thesis with the fact that they're suggesting ignoring customer suggestions? The attitude of if it ain't broke don't fix it is really you asking to be crushed by a competitor. This said, the caveat here is when it comes to ideas. Better approaches to solving a problem are often simpler or more elegant, and require an out-of-the-box approach.

meerita 7y ago

This article was written with full fallacies. One example of this logical fallacy is because it doesn't count that features are done based on KPI. It's not about adding nonsensical features, it's about to increase KPIs, therefore, make even more business. Also, this rule doesn't apply to all products, so it's a fallacy. People who downvote this just doesn't understand or never carried a business seriously. They're just hedonists on design. That's all.