Is minimalism becoming an excuse for lack of features?
A handful of products I see posted on IH nowadays market themselves as "minimal" or "simple," not because they don't ship unnecessary features, are easy to use, or have a simpler design, but because they lack features their competitors have. Some of these features are essential to users.
I'm not saying that simplicity is a bad thing. However, many products marketed as "simple" seem to be trying to cover up the fact that they're lacking compared to other products.
I see it so often that I've started becoming wary of products with the word "simple" in their tagline.
What do you think?
Though I think your suspicion may be right in many cases, I think that often an app is promoted as simple in comparison to a large competitor that's unnecessarily complex because of tech debt or because it's unfeasible to redesign it (for example because there are many existing users who may not welcome changes). The design space for a particular kind of solution/app can be large in the sense that your solution could look drastically different from mine, and maybe your solution would be obviously simpler even if both solutions solve the same problem.
I think your opinion is partially true. However, I think we have so much information around us, and having too many features available may become overwhelming for users. I think being a niche tool for like one or two things may be a way to attract audiences who want a separate solution for their every need and not be bombarded with tools in one product.
I believe that "niching down" do one feature has just become - and rightly so - a good strategy and idea generator for Saas/Micro-Saas.
Doing ONE feature only but better, faster or in a simpler manner than a competitor is a strong selling point in a market where the demand for that feature has been confirmed and where the risk of having no audience interested is null.
It is also oftentimes easier than trying to come up with an entirely new idea.
It's an identity tool to explain what is it in few words. As time goes, you need to build moats to stay competitive.
My issue is that often times, people are too ignorant on the features that some of the existing products actually do far superior job.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago