Design Tradeoffs

A number of additional factors may affect the design of a product. For example, marketing considerations may require you to deliver a product with a minimal design process, or comparative evaluations may force you to consider additional features. Remember that shortcuts and additional features can affect the product. There is no simple equation to determine when a design tradeoff is appropriate. So in evaluating the impact, consider the following:

• Every additional feature potentially affects performance, complexity, stability, maintenance, and the support costs of an application.
• It is harder to fix a design problem after the release of a product because users may adapt, or even become dependent on, a peculiarity in the design.
• Simplicity is not the same as being simplistic. Making something simple to use often requires a good deal of work and code.
• Features implemented by a small extension in the application code do not necessarily have a proportional effect in a user interface. For example, if the primary task is selecting a single object, extending it to support selection of multiple objects could make the frequent, simple task more difficult to carry out.