Creeping featurism, is what I called this problem in 1988, the symptom of the dreaded disease of featuritis. By 1992 the word processing program Microsoft Word had 311 commands. Three Hundred and Eleven. That’s a daunting amount, more than I dreamed was possible when I wrote my 1988 book. Who could learn over three hundred commands for a single program? Who would want to? Who would ever need them? Answer: nobody. They are there for a lot of reasons. In part, they are there because this one program must cover the whole word, so, in principle, for every command, there is at least one user somewhere who finds it essential. In part, thought, they are there because the programmers dreamed them up; if it was possible to do, it was done. But the most important reason is for MARKETING. My program is bigger than yours. Better it can do more. Anything you have, I have too, and more besides.
Creeping featurism may be the wrong term: perhaps it should be called rampant featurism. Do you think 311 commands is a lot for a word processing program? Five year later, in 1997, that same word processing program, Microsoft Word, had 1033 commands. One Thousand Thirty three.
Donald Norman, The invisible Computer, The MIT Press,
Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1998, p.80-81.
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