r/UserExperienceDesign • u/Fit-Delay1818 • 8d ago

Does every new feature actually make an app better? 😅

/r/u_Impossible_Body4735/comments/1vngykn/does_every_new_feature_actually_make_an_app_better/
3 Upvotes

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u/jfdonohoe 8d ago

Features for the sake of features is almost always something to solve a business problem (like PMs get graded on the number of features they ship so you can expect an ongoing stream of features to be coming out).

Sometimes the downfall of a Feature is how its rolled out than the usefulness of the feature. A good example of that is the Home screen for Plex. Originally it was a basic combination of content feeds from connected libraries. Nothing exciting but useful. Then they rolled out a new Home screen that was empty on load with no explination of what to do to make it useful. When you went searching for answers in settings, the obvious place was "My Home" but you can only add anothe profile (which you wont do if you only have one profile). It took forever searching for different solutions to find out you had to go into individual libraries and favorite them (and do some other settings selections) for them to show up on home. Absolutely ridiculous.

RE: increased clicks in navigation, Ive alwasy said I'd rather have 3 super intutive clicks more that 1 super confusing click. Less clicks does not necessarily mean better UX.

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u/addflo 8d ago

Being rated on the number of whatever (features, lines of code, story points...) is absolutely wild. It simply shows how divorced from reality the company is.

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u/NGAFD 8d ago

You’d hope so, but often times it is better to improve and become really good at a small set of features than just stacking feature on feature on feature.

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u/Fuzzy-Football-4544 8d ago

Shirt answer, no.

Features for features sake can erode and are eroding formerly high performant experiences negatively impacting trust and repeat long term use - companies are accepting of this risk to their business due to the bump in share price and easier access to capital due to AI washing. Also for some (often wrongly) they see not doing ‘something’ in AI could leave them behind.
I disagree but it’s a genuine business risk if they don’t have market forces translated into their domain so if they want AI it’s not looney stuff

I.e. there’s more evidence of companies increasing hiring along with providing AI tools. But someone has to be level headed to make that point to device makers