Khoi Vinh discusses the trade off between features and ease of use. Using Cooper et al (2003) curve on the distribution of experience of users (i.e. most users are perpetual intermediates), he posits the problems users face with products heavy on features:
On the other hand, products designed to map closely to the needs of experts are often turn-offs to beginners and intermediates. Users who come across features that reveal not just the complexity but also the specificity that experts need often quickly decide, “This isn’t for me.†Rarely will a beginner find herself delighted as to how well a product has been designed to map to a skillset she doesn’t yet have.
Subtraction: Offending Experts and Pleasing Everybody
He then suggests designing for the purple overlap, which represents the “sweet spot. I think the approach work well with artefacts that have basic clearly-defined set of functions (e.g. Mp3 players), but doesn’t work with artefacts whose basic use is different even among intermediate users in products like Office: the famous quote that everybody uses 10% percent of the features but a different 10%. I think a solution lies in seeing the design in layers: the designer should concentrate on the infrastructure (e.g. software/social architecture), a position suggested by my thesis (Papantoniou, 2006). Then even though he actually designs an interface primarily for the purple region of the chart, the designed product can actually support other uses in the future (whether those are implemented by the designer or the community).
References
Cooper, A., & Reimann, R. (2003). About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design: John Wiley & Sons.
Papantoniou, B. (2006). Design of Information Systems through a Pragmatist Approach. PhD Thesis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece.
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