Back in March, I linked to an article that was talking about how information overload from today’s technology might be causing an aquired form of attention deficit disorder.

Yesterday, Beyond Bullets had a similar post on the topic. They link to several recent studies that show that information overload can make you dumb. "This may sound like a no-brainer, but a couple of new studies report that people suffer a drop in their thinking ability when they experience information overload."

I firmly believe this is also the case when it comes to the software experience, where less IS more. When creating software, you need to stop for a minute and ask yourself a few simple questions when adding a feature:

• Are 80% of the users going to find this feature useful? Seriously. Come on, be honest - when was the last time you turned on the "Auto Space like Word 95" or the "Truncate Font Height" options in Word?
• Is the feature Interpretive?
• How discoverable is it? If your answer is ‘click on this menu, open this dialog, select this option’, let me tell you, it’s not discoverable. Most people will miss it.
• Is it jarring? Does the feature fit within the context of their environment?
• What is the user’s experience when using the feature?

Developers need to stop writing software with overloaded features that just do things just because they can (you’ll end up with nothing more than a bad software experience) and start to focus on simplicity.