Introducing complexity beyond necessity

Complexity is attractive because it feels like progress.

But it’s an illusion. A false sense of thoroughness. And we have to be careful not to over engineer things.

Designing something that has more functions than is necessary or helpful only makes the process worse.

Mercedes famously had an internal campaign to reduce over engineering in their cars. Years ago they removed more than six hundred functions from their vehicles. An executive said the functions were ones that no one really needed, and no one knew how to use.

Like the storage of a driver’s personal seat position in the car key. It was done with good intentions, but if you take your spouse’s key at some point and can’t find your own seat position any more, that’s more annoying than it is comfortable.

Another example I love is the wifi smart juicing press from a few years ago. With an outrageous price of seven hundred dollars, one journalist published a story that showed that the juice packs could be squeezed by hand faster than the press, and in so doing, produce nearly indistinguishable quality and quantity from the output of the machine.

Juicegate, they called it. The horror! The horror!

Ultimately, containing feature bloat is a challenge in numerous domains. This not only applies to manufacturers, but anyone going through any kind of process.

Over engineering is something we all have to deal with at some point. I did this a lot in the early days of my career as a writer. I would get lost in the organization of my content, rather than the content itself. Focusing on the architecture made me feel strategic and sophisticated.

When in reality, I wasn’t putting words on paper. Which, as any writer will tell you, is the only thing that really matters.

Did you blacken any pages today?