What are the steps in making your own simple product?

It’s a natural temptation to add more functionality to a design, but often, offering less is better.

Most designers are familiar with the concept and reality of “feature creep” in new-product implementation. Whether spurred on by the engineering team itself (“Hey, we can add that, and it won’t cost anything”) or marketing (“Let’s add these features so prospects will be even more impressed”), it’s an omnipresent risk. Even if that added feature may not cost anything in the strict sense (or perhaps just a little memory), it’s another thing to do, test, check for interactions, add an explanation in the user guide, and support on a helpline for clarifications.

In many cases, the unintentional havoc wreaked by even a few innocuous features is often far out of proportion to their potential benefit. However, feature creep does not apply solely to products that already have lots of features, as it can also affect and needlessly complicate fairly simple ones, as seen in a modest personal example.

I was looking for a basic digital stopwatch for a six-year-old niece who was into measuring “how long” various tasks took (whether this is a sign of her future profession or obsession, we’ll have to wait a decade or so on that!).

There are hundreds of such stopwatches on the market selling for $10 to $15, and they are functionally identical, with packaging and display size being their differences. I bought one for smaller hands and didn’t think there would be any issues (Figure 1).

Figure 1. This basic digital stopwatch for children, representative of dozens of similar models, has some additional features and a hidden function that complicates its use by the target audience (Image: Lakeshore Learning).

Figure 2. The classic mechanical stopwatch does one thing and does it well, but it is not a suitable choice for most children (Image: Humboldt Manufacturing).

It turns out that this simple stopwatch also includes a time-of-day clock function, with a “mode” button to toggle between the desired stopwatch mode and the undesired clock mode. Of course, that button gets pushed quite often, so it becomes frustrating to use the stopwatch.

It gets worse
Adding to the aggravation, there’s an undocumented key sequence that turns on an annoying hourly chime. Of course, it is easy enough to inadvertently enter that sequence while playing the stopwatch, which is what children do. The stopwatch directions don’t mention this chime and offer no clue how to disable it. It was all so needlessly frustrating that I was tempted to the electronic digital model with an old-fashioned mechanical one (Figure 2).

Figure 3. Additional searches revealed a true stopwatch-only unit for children without a clock or chime functions (Image: Learning Resources).

To resolve the chime issue, I searched the web and looked at the specifics of several dozen basic stopwatches. They had nearly identical features and descriptions, likely because they probably all use the same core IC. Luckily, I eventually found one that briefly mentioned its chime function, and some more digging brought me to the cryptic instructions for turning off that function (but it could not be permanently deactivated and so still could be turned back on, unfortunately).

Out of curiosity and guilt, I kept searching the web and finally came across a stopwatch truly for children which proclaims that it does just that and nothing more (Figure 3). Had I found it sooner, the entire frustrating stopwatch + clock + chime situation would have been avoided. (I assume it uses the same chip as all the other units but with its “mode” switch connection hard-wired internally to the stopwatch setting.)

Figure 4. This tiny, lightweight MP3 music player does only one thing, which makes it a better solution for some situations than a more complicated, costly, and flexible smartphone (Image: SanDisk).

I’ve had a similar situation when listening to music while out for a casual bike ride (at a low volume, of course). I originally used my smartphone, but that required a special mounting bracket and exposed the phone to the usual risks of being in the open while riding.

Again, the solution was to keep it simple. I bought an inexpensive, easy-to-use Western Digital/SanDisk MP3 music player, which weighs less than an ounce and measures just 2.60” × 1.60” × 0.63” (Figure 4). It’s easier to carry on the bike, and if something happens to it, it’s not a big deal.

The lesson here is one that has been repeatedly cited but is also easily and often ignored: keep a design’s features as simple as needed to accomplish the task. Less is often better, and just because you can do more doesn’t mean you have to do so, as too much of a good thing may just be too much.