• The New Yorker, Wednesday, May 23, 2007 10:45 AM

Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn't figure out how to use them.

Feature creep is partly the product of the so-called internal-audience problem: The people who design and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them. What engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what's best for consumers. And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers.

There is no easy solution to this. A product that doesn't have enough features may fail to catch a consumer's eye in the store. But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth. In theory, the best strategy would be to make the complex simple.

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