Overloading features - why consumer electronics are so complicated

Overloading features - why consumer electronics are so complicated

Overloading features - why consumer electronics are so complicated

Everything seems very complicated these days, especially anything electronic ... which is more and more everyday products.

Why is it so complicated? "Hey, our cell phone takes photos, charged knives, stir grass, pay your bills, drive your car, cook dinner, all by voice command!" Give us a break!

Unfortunately, the reason why so many electronic products are stuffed with characteristics is that it is relatively cheap to add features to it! Do we consumers really want these jobs or do we need them? This is a completely different question. Often, the answer is no, but manufacturers add them, in many cases, simply so that they can advertise that they have more features.

Identifying the most requested features is the most accurate and designing the products to be feature-rich, yet easy to use and simple to use for people. That is why this vital step is often brief.

Have you had any problem figuring out how to program your VCR? Have you ever thought that maybe it's not really your fault? It's the fault of engineers who designed a poor user interface for the product. And do you think it's bad? Try using the VCR-DVD composite player!

A second reason manufacturers are mobilizing more suspicious features in their products. In the case of products such as mobile phones, sales have slowed down because most people who want one of them have one. So, phone manufacturers continue to add features to try to find features that motivate people to buy new phones. They are looking for the latest great features that people will be willing to buy a new phone to get.

Similarly, digital camera manufacturers continue to come out with more and more megapixels. Megapixels, then 3.2, then 4.0, then 5, now 6, 7, up to 8. Do consumers need 7 or 8-megapixel cameras? Not at least. In order to take shots or share photos online, the 3.2-megapixel camera is more than enough. Oh really.

So why do manufacturers continue to expand their capabilities? As we said: 1) so they can declare their possession of it, and 2) to try to get people to hold the old camera in a drawer and buy a new camera.

Our advice: It's great to look carefully at the features that are provided in the products you care about. Don't assume that a product with more features (or higher numbers) is the better option. Often this is not the case. There are more mistakes that we have to make.

Plotware

There is a similar phenomenon in software. Called "BlueTooth". Programs that are overloaded with features, especially those that are not of fundamental importance to the program's primary objective, carry this montage.

When I was in the software industry and we were working on the next versions of software products, coders sometimes came up and said, "Hey, I can add such a feature with only 150 lines of code," or some of that number. This is not much because a program can contain hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But often it was a feature that users of this program did not need. As a consumer advocate, I would like to ask why this feature will be required. If the answer is questionable, I would tell them to get out of it. But often, these features turn into software products and become crowded with unnecessary features. Blog.