The Pfeiffer report has an interesting report on technology trends. Something that’s been obvious (well, to me) for a while already: features & benefits are getting less and less important as product differentiators. I experienced this when looking for a digital camera: everyone has mexapixels galore, and all functions are comparable. So what do you differentiate on?

User experience, for one. It may be the new buzzword (fits right in with the new trends towards experiential marketing) but there’s certainly something to be said for it. The report highlights 10 key rules to go by:

  1. More features isn’t better, it’s worse. You’re just going to confuse people.
  2. You can’t make things easier by adding to them. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity (the old KISS principle still applies, folks!)
  3. Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker. If it’s too complicated and confusing, people will tune out. Period.
  4. Style matters. One word: iPod.
  5. Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
  6. Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users. Nobody has time anymore to learn all the features on all their devices.
  7. Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use.
  8. Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
  9. Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
  10. Less is difficult, that’s why less is more.

Read the Pfeiffer report here.