Experience Rot

Here’s a counter-intuitive fact: Chances are all those features you’ve been adding to your design are hurting your user experience. Every feature that’s squeezed in, in the name of giving your design a competitive edge, has been making your design less competitive.

Welcome to the effects of Experience Rot. As you add features, you’re adding complexity to the design, and decreasing the quality of the experience.

Pick up any modern TV remote and you’ll immediately see the problem of experience rot. On/Off, volume and channel selectors are no longer enough. We need to switch devices, control captions, have a text capability for on-screen editing, a thumbs-up and thumbs-down for ratings, pause, record, slow motion, rewind, 30-second rewind, and, well, you see the effects. The complexity never ends, it never gets simpler, and it’s never delightful.

Experience Rot Starts with Version 2 (maybe earlier)

By their nature, most first releases of a design are really simple. The design is a small collection of well thought out features. Everything fits and makes perfect sense. At this time, the rot hasn’t begun. Everything is new and fresh.

However, that doesn’t last long. The moment a new feature is added–one that wasn’t considered in the initial design–the rot starts to take hold. It’s at…