Do you have any phones that make phone calls?

“Do you have any phones that make phone calls?” Too often, in their eagerness to layer on additional functionality, developers lose sight of the product’s basic function—the one thing it must do extremely well. ¹

A team of marketing and business researchers from the University of Maryland have investigated the familiar phenomena of "feature fatigue": how products often become unusable as an increasing number of features are added to make them a more attractive purchase.

This is a useful concept in understanding how user-configurable learning spaces could inhibit learners. The experiments undertaken by the researchers (with undergraduate students) demonstrated how the problem, results from a deficiency in the consumer's ability to envisage the usability of the product before they purchase, combined with uncertainty about the cases in which the product will actually be used:

Before use, capability mattered more to the participants than usability, but after use, usability drove satisfaction rates. As a result, satisfaction was higher with the simpler version of the product, and in a complete reversal from the earlier studies, the high-feature model was now rejected by most participants.

The answer then is to help the consumer to understand and prioritise their needs, and to then envisage the connection between needs, features and usability. There are well tried methods:

To help consumers learn which products best suit their needs, managers should consider designing decision aids, such as recommendation agents that “interview” buyers about their requirements, or offering extended product trials—two techniques that can increase the salience of usability in the purchase decision.

Do students encounter feature fatigue when using our increasingly feature rich and configurable physcal and online learning spaces? Will the same approach significantly improve their capabilities: understanding needs, features and usability? Could a learning design patterns approach be the basis for useful decision aids?

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¹ Roland T. Rust, Debora Viana Thompson, and Rebecca W. Hamilton, Defeating Feature Fatigue, Harvard Business Review, February 2006

Robert O'Toole : 22 Jul 2009 23:57 |  Tags: Design Methods Inspiration |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem