Mobile feature creep

In this text causes and effects of feature creep in mobile telephones are being discussed. The problem with feature creep is that adding more features makes mobile telephones harder to use. Instead of paying attention to the ease of use of a telephone, most companies are only concerned with offering more features than the competitor. And the customer is debit to this behaviour.

Customers want features and therefore companies are offering them features. And since the competition can always offer more features, thus making their phones more attractive to the customers, all competitors try to stay ahead, giving rise to even more, seemingly needless, additions.

Due to the increasing number of features mobile telephones are also becoming increasingly hard to use: there is an inverse relation between the two. This inverse relationship can be demonstrated by making the one of the most simplest devices more complex: light switches. One light switch on a wall is simple to operate, yet when another switch is added to operate a second lamp, it becomes harder to decide which switch to use for what lamp. The telephone example is much more extreme. Last few years, with only a few buttons more, manufactures managed to hide inside a radio, an mp3-player, a camera, a gaming device and much more.

Is there a solution? There is much innovation taking place in the area of mobile hardware, which has led to, among others, the touch screen. Instead of having fixed buttons, a screen can change, and display buttons most appropriate to the task. Yet the touch screen lacks tactile feedback and because of this it is harder to operate the touch screen driven device inside your pocket. This deficiency has already led to smart use of the rumble function inside the telephone, or using soft click-sounds, but before we can expect real (tactile) feedback on a mobile device, we just have to hope that companies can think about their feature-set first.