Usability beats features

Kathy Sierra has a great post called Featuritis vs the Happy User Peak where she talks about the importance of keeping products (all kinds of products) usable, instead of trying to add constantly more functionality. Just a look at the graphic that illustrates her post says it all.

She summarizes:

Be brave. And besides, continuing to pile on new features eventually leads to an endless downhill slide toward poor usability and maintenance. A negative spiral of incremental improvements. Fighting and clawing for market share by competing solely on features is an unhealthy, unsustainable, and unfun way to live.

Be the “I Rule” product, not the “This thing I bought does everything, but I suck!” product.

A very important lesson to bear in mind when writing software.