Digital signage and feature creep - can we break the cycle?

The New Yorker has a great article on feature creep that really hit home with me, especially after spending a few days in the presence of a few hundred of my closest competitors at the DSE show last week. The argument made in the article is essentially this: "buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple."

That's exactly the problem that we deal with at WireSpring day in and day out. Since we're a relatively small company, my job is to mediate between all of the different groups of people working here, and try to figure out what our best course of action is. Our sales guys want more functionality so we can stack up better in a head-to-head competitions. Our support and QA folks want less functionality, since more bells and whistles lead to larger user manuals and more tech support calls. Our programmers want to know that they have job security, so more development is always looked upon favorably; but of course expanding the development team to get more work done faster is an expensive -- and eventually unsustainable -- proposition for management.

I sit in the middle of it all, guessing at which features will be important and which will not. I personally tend to side with the "less is better" camp, and in fact we frequently sit down and try to figure out what functionality we can remove from FireCast apart from what new stuff is going to get put in. But still, there are always those features that you simply must have if for no other reason than the customer expects to see them in a demo. My personal favorite? The scrolling text ticker. I've never -- ever -- seen a good use of a text ticker in a retail digital signage application, yet time after time customers and prospects ask if we have the capability (we do). They'll then trial the product, do a pilot project, and eventually deploy the network. But by that time, the text ticker will be long gone, typically replaced by simple, full-screen video. For many applications, this, the most simple of applications, is really the best.

So I suppose the whole point of this rant is to compel those people considering a digital signage project to not confuse "complex" with "good." As a product guy, I still have to remind myself of this constantly (heck, there's even a post-it stuck to my monitor that says simple = good), and as I said before, I'm certainly coming to the point where we always try to come up with the simple solution first. As you go through the process of getting your project together, consider your overall goals, and let them determine what functionality is really important.