Features overload

How much is too much?

I was having a conversation with a colleague today, and came across a topic which has been bothering me for a while now.

Over the years we have been programmed to use certain programs. One classic example of this is Microsoft Word. Now as programs go this is the king of Word Processors. It can do anything you need it to do, possibly. But here’s where we should stop for a second and ask a question. What do we need to do? Are you, for example, writing a huge report, full of footnotes, references and a full table of contents? Yes? Then don’t hesitate to use Word. It will do it better than most programs. If you’re simply typing a small piece of text to save a paragraph from an article say, then do you really need a program with 300 buttons across the top of the screen? Definitely not. TextEdit will do the job. It will do it better than word in a few ways. Firstly, the file you save will be tiny. Secondly it will open up in a fraction of a second.

In this day and age, with the iPhone and iPad showing us that you only really need one button (the home button), and websites such as Facebook actually taking things away from their pages to make things look simpler, software companies seem not to notice this trend. They are cramming more buttons into less space, and this actually makes our jobs harder.

So remember, there are simpler alternatives to what we use on a daily basis. These will save you time, effort and in some cases, your sanity.