| I'm torn; lots of angst about 'but somebody might one-day need that feature!' Isn't this exactly why, feature creep? It's not a fair argument, no more fair than 'it's only used by 0.1% of pageviews'. Neither is the full story. If there's another way to accomplish the same thing, remove the more complex one. If the feature is part of a process that can be done another way, remove it. If the feature is used by an actual 0.1% of users, the impact of removing it is small. Anyway, I had a friend in the bad old days, had a bulletin board (a bank of phones connected to modems that connected to a bank of computers) that hosted around 300 games. Folks would log in, play a game or two, log out. He checked; only 10 games ever got played, pretty much. So he started removing most of the rest. Callers declined 80% in the first week. Disaster; they paid by the minute. See, folks were browsing his games, the most on any bulletin board! That's why they came to him, to see all that. Then, sure, they'd play the same popular games nearly every time. But they had to see the other ones there to feel like it was the right place to go. Sometimes, it's not about the feature being used. It's about the user's confidence they won't get stuck (I can always back out this change! Oh! The backout button is gone?! Panic), or feel the product is supported adequately, or even, it's a checkbox on a purchase requirements list. Remove features at your peril! |