An appeal to designers and product people.
- Overdesign adds unnecessary complexity. This complexity causes compounding downstream issues for users, engineers, other designers and all involved. Avoiding complexity makes it easier to avoid the other items on this list.
- Overdesign adds noise. Excessive features make it more difficult for users, teammates and everyone involved to learn and adopt critical features.
- Overdesign adds development time. Creating, implementing and testing more features takes more time than doing the same with less.
- Overdesign adds maintenance. Additional features require more knowledge to maintain. That knowledge must be transferred to coworkers and future contributors.
- Overdesign is not elegant. All things being equal, a machine with fewer moving parts is better than one with many.
- Overdesign is not customer-centric. Overdesigned solutions are not customer-centric, because they are not focused on solving customer problems.
