Feature Creep: what is it, and how does it affect the user experience

When user and business value are affected by excessive requirements and constant product modification

Scope Creep Sully by Dan Baldwin

Feature creep sounds like the title of a low-budget horror movie. The sad news is — it’s a scary reality! Websites often bombard users with features they don’t want, forcing them to crawl through barrier-ridden journeys of hell.

“Feature creep (sometimes known as requirements creep or scope creep) is a tendency for product or project requirements to increase during development beyond those originally foreseen.” — Tech Target.

You might notice many strange and twisted labels for the product modification phenomenon when you search for it. ‘Software bloat’, ‘scope creep’, ‘creeping featurism’ or the sound of a nasty illness: ‘featuritis’ are just some examples. However, regardless of its many guises, the sinister occurrence results from designing for feature-led experiences rather than user-centred ones.

How feature creep affects the user experience

How does feature creep affect a user experience? Let’s take a new website visit, for example. The homepage presents you with a smart app banner, cookie consent, and a newsletter sign-up message, often simultaneously on the same screen. These features want to inform or sell you something before you can begin engaging with the website’s true value proposition.

Facebook is a particular example of where feature creep affects the user experience. Initially intended to help people build new connections, the social media platform’s simple idea eventually became overcomplicated and unethical. People now find themselves painfully negotiating through a wall of adverts, unreliable news sources, and meaningless memes.

While some organisations have good intentions of adding user-centred features, they often don’t listen to what their users want. In addition to the lack of user discovery, there are various reasons why feature creep occurs in businesses, such as:

• Pressure to generate new leads and increase commercial value
• Outperform competitors using features they don’t have
• Product modification through individual team perspectives and needs
• HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) wants the feature(s)

Mind the gap

Only 8% of customers will tell you that they’re getting a good quality service from the brand they engage. The problem is that 80% of businesses believe they already deliver a top-quality service.

“80% of businesses believe they provide ‘superior’ customer service. But only 8% of customers say they’re getting it!” — CustomerThink.

These statistics illustrate the vast gap between what businesses believe they support and what they deliver. The gap occurs because users or customers do not experience the quality they expect from a brand, and feature creep is one of the critical reasons this happens.

“Despite good intentions, lots of user-centred design isn’t actually user-centred.” — Luke Wroblewski.

Luke Wroblewski, Google Product Director, uses an excellent example of feature creep in his talk, Mind the Gap. Wroblewski uses the following contact form scenario to explain how different groups recontextualise requirements from their viewpoint.

The contact form seems simple enough, right?

A UX team has designed the above contact form with functionality based on agreed-upon stakeholder requirements.

The contact form has now doubled in size!!

Then the Sales team hears about this contact form and views it as an opportunity for generating new leads. So they add new requirements, including a phone number, address and a subject line.

Yikes! This contact form is starting to grow into a beast!

Then the Engineering team intervenes and advises the teams that they cannot capture specific data, such as name and address, by using single fields. So they add some more fields to meet technical needs.

Could the contact form get any worse now?

Now the Marketing team steps in and views the contact form as an opportunity to capture demographic information. More requirements are added, including gender, date of birth, and marketing preferences.

Now we’ve created a monster!

The design process doesn’t stop with the Marketing team. The Legal team now suggests further requirements, including user consent, that users must check and accept.

A simple contact form has mutated into a complicated user experience through feature creep. Do you think people want to invest their precious time in a complex process like this?

“These gradually competing agendas and perspectives start creeping into the products we make.” — Luke Wroblewski.

We can learn from Wroblewski’s scenario that business requirements can quickly escalate when involving multiple viewpoints. As the amount of features increases, the design becomes at greater risk of complication. Wroblewski identifies this common issue within organisations that grow and where decision-making moves further away from users or customers.

Feature creep costs time and money

We’ve seen how feature creep can overcomplicate a design and affect the user experience. However, adding too many features can impact customer loyalty, commercial value, and a business’s brand reputation.

Feature creep can damage a business in many more ways, including:

• Adding new features extends the project deadline.
• Additional features increase the risk of creating new bugs.
• Resolving new bugs hamper resources assigned to fixing existing issues.
• Teams, such as marketing, are stretched too thin to focus on the key value propositions.
• Increasing features can encourage initial purchases but also increase dissatisfaction and lower customer lifetime value (CLV). This marketing phenomenon is also known as ‘feature fatigue’.
• Counterintuitive products reduce the overall quality of experience, which in turn lowers customer loyalty.

It’s time to starve the feature creep monster!

Feature creep affects both user and business value. It overcomplicates the design and goes beyond the essential function and key proposition of a product. And this inadvertently increases cost, delays project delivery, lowers customer loyalty, and diminishes brand reputation.

So what can we do to starve the feature creep monster?

• Businesses need to start aligning their priorities to deliver more user-centred experiences.
• Teams must collaborate early to ensure individual needs and perspectives do not drive constant product modification.
• Project managers and stakeholders must find the right balance between business objectives and user needs by resolving existing issues over adding new features.
• UX teams must have a written scope of work agreed upon by the stakeholders. If new features are requested, stakeholders need to recognise the potential impact on the project before doing so.
• Stakeholders must consider ditching or replacing features that cause detriment or offer little value to the user journey.

As businesses grow, they will continue to feed the feature creep monster. But this horror show doesn’t have to go on. Organisations must realise that price and additional features will no longer be the key brand differentiator. It’s time to focus on what truly matters — quality user experiences.