A shining example is an article that was recently published in The Guardian titled “My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots“. The protagonist launches into an array of annoying qualities about his phone that render it nearly unusable. In the event that he does manage to squeeze out a phone call, the process of fighting his way there leaves him flustered and angered. This experience has affected him so much that it has changed the way he looks at phones, and he is spreading the word.

This is a huge step forward from the days where someone would be confused by a horribly designed device and chalk it up to themselves being too stupid to understand it. This particular scenario happens regularly with elders and computers when they hear about all that can be done with a computer. Because they’ve never had a good experience to compare to, the arcane methods used to navigate these little boxes appear overwhelmingly daunting and complex. When it comes down to it, there is a very good reason that elders typically feel this way.

Computers are overwhelmingly daunting and complex.

Not without good reason, mind you. The amount that these little boxes can accomplish is quite impressive, and with a great amount of options comes an equal or greater amount of methods to use those options. These options, in modern day parlance, have come to be known as “features”. It becomes easy to forget that the more features a device has, the more difficult it is to operate. This is why it takes multiple people with years of training to operate the dizzying array of knobs, switches, levers, and dials on a Boeing 747.

Historically, the more features a device had, the more expensive it was to produce. This kept a check on how complex devices became, as soon people wouldn’t pay more for the features they didn’t want. People developed a shorthand of using “feature lists” to demarcate which devices were better than others, and advertisers jumped at this opportunity to quickly and easily have something in writing that made their product stand out. This worked well for everyone involved.

Then along came software. With this advent, the cost to add in things that would qualify as “features” reduced dramatically, as they only had to be created once, and could be freely duplicated. Suddenly we have email with tailored ads, phones you can watch movies on, and video games on everything with a screen. If it adds a bullet to the feature list, throw it in. Because this used to be the most efficient way to determine the best product, people instinctively pick the product with “more stuff” in it over the one that might actually accomplish what they want done.

As a real-life example, a calculator manufacturer recently had two models for sale with the exact same functionality; the only real difference was the model number. Yet one of these calculators was selling much more than the other. Curious, the company hired a research agency to find out why. The agency went into stores where the calculators were sold side by side, and watched people compare feature lists, try out the calculators, and repeatedly pick one over the other. Then they went up to the customer and asked why they chose the one they did. Many of the customers had no idea, some said they just went with intuition, and some explained their process.

After reading the boxes and trying them out, they held one calculator in each hand and comparatively weighed them. They picked the heavier one, because it must have “more stuff” inside.

This method of thinking worked well for centuries, but is painfully out of date today. The mentality that you are missing out by not cramming every possible feature into something you pay for is self-defeating. People forget that for every feature you add, there needs to be a way to access it. Quickly you have gadgets with screen after screen of options, and suddenly you can’t get past the kitchen timer and movie player just to place a call.

A few companies have been producing focused products that accomplish the best tasks for their job, making it a point to leave out features that only get in the way. However, people still using the old way of thinking hold this against them. People dislike the iPod with the reasoning that it doesn’t have an FM tuner. People scoff at the Wii because it doesn’t have a DVD player. They think that if every imaginable feature isn’t squeezed into a gadget, it is less desirable. On the contrary, every feature you add crams more into the same little space. Soon when you want to sit down, relax, and just listen to your music or play a game, you have to fight through all the stuff you thought you wanted. It is far better to have a simple, direct interface that will immediately do what you want almost before you ask. It doesn’t do everything, but what it does, it does well.

The article that I mentioned at the beginning touches on this, but still comes from the old way of thinking. The title of the article focuses on the features that are on the phone, and how horrible they are. As he launches into the article, his complaints focus not on the features, but how unusable the device has become because there are so many loaded on. I haven’t seen a simple, small phone without buttons on every side in years. I regularly hear people complain about this, so the market is obviously there, but not loud enough to drive things yet.

It’s easy to drive the products with feature glut into extinction. Buy the things that do what you want, not the ones that promise to do everything. They already have to give away the phone in the article. Let’s make sure they don’t get made at all.

Then along came Henry Ford and the assembly line. Suddenly you could guarantee that every part looked the same, felt the same, and worked the same. Quality control became easier, and production cheaper. Suddenly people found themselves in a flood of identical items, allowing them to quantitatively judge themselves against others. Keeping up with the Joneses became a national pastime. Appliances, cars, clothes, it didn’t matter. The brand of an item became a cachet, allowing people to quickly judge how someone viewed themselves by which of the assembly line products they chose.

Soon production became so inexpensive that it was cheaper to make a new widget than fix the old one. Objects became single-use items that had no long-lasting value or emotional attachment, and disposable culture was born. If something stopped working, you just threw it out and got a new one. Countless electronics don’t even have batteries that are removable, because they know it just isn’t worth it.

However, there is a backlash brewing. People want to have an emotional attachment to the items they have on them all the time. People want their belongings to have a sense of value to them, to be an extension of themselves. They put stickers over their computers, covering the vast flat expanses. They put a meaningful photo or cartoon as their desktop. They want others to know at a glance that this object belongs to them, that this widget is an extension of themselves and their personality.

Corporations are here to help.

Back in the heady dot com days, I bought a pair of Customatix [2000-2004, RIP]. You could go in and choose what kind of shoe you wanted, what colors, what style of laces, even which logo you wanted. The shoes had tags on the side that said whatever you wanted to have embroidered there. No longer did I have to choose from the oppressive colors and designs that the stores deemed worthy. I was free to create shoes that looked like whatever I wanted, and they would even be made in this country. It was win-win, and soon i had a pair of boots that advertised my website. It was much more subtle than it sounds, I assure you.

Now, more and more companies are going this same direction. Nike has spawned Nike iD, a site that lets you pick from most of their products and choose the colors you want in a clean, simple website that guides you through the process. Nike also owns Converse, which released Converse One, a nearly identical interface that allows you to design your Converse. Puma also lets you build your own shoes at the Mongolian Shoe BBQ, going for a completely different method, but with the same results. Puma used to only offer this directly in their store, digging through piles of fabric to pick the pieces you wanted to build your shoe with, and their website does a good job of approximating this. Getting a pair of shoes that express your personality has never been easier.

The world of customization no longer stops at shoes, however. It has been seeping into other quotidian items, like messenger bags. Timbuk2 offers a website that will let you personalize one of their bags with whatever colors you like. Freitag took it a step further, allowing you to “kill a truck” and rip apart the tarpaulin with stencils, picking exactly the area of fabric you want your bag to be built from. It’s amazing how detailed personalization is becoming.

Walking around wearing shoes and a messenger bag you designed yourself still isn’t enough for you? If you can no longer stand that pre-made watch on your wrist, Swiss watch manufacturer 121 Time will let you futz with the details of your own high-end timepiece. Fossil or Blancier will let you do the same, to varying degrees. Why drink what everyone else drinks when you could be sipping custom wine from Elite Vintners? Wearing all of these personalized items, you obviously can’t drive something that looks like what everyone else has, so Harley-Davidson will let you custom-build your own hog, all the way down to your choice of seat and tailpipe.

While riding around on your custom motorcycle, listening to what some snobby DJ on the radio thinks you should listen to is simply too oppressive. Thankfully, the BBC is launching MyBBCRadio, which will let you pick what kind of music you want to listen to. If you can’t wait, Pandora and MusicLens will let you do the same right now.

Enough about running through the daily rat race, what about personalized playtime with custom toys? There is always the Lego Factory, which will let you build anything you want out of legos. You can make your own Hot Wheels or Barbie if that’s more your speed. In any spare time, you can read a PersonalNOVEL created using the names of you and your loved ones as the main characters (providing you read German). And you can pay for it all with a custom credit card from Flexi, that not only lets you personalize how the card itself looks, but choose exactly what your terms of service are for your intricately individual life.

However, personalization doesn’t stop at physical objects, either. Snakes on a Plane recently launched a campaign that allows you to send a personal phone message from Samuel Jackson to a friend. Before long, on a whim we will be able to instantly personalize a touching and memorable song for those delicate moments in life. Just think of the possibilities.

Take your average glass drink bottle and make the top twist off. Suddenly the need for clumsy bottle openers on every vending machine is obsolete. Add a spring mechanism to the inside of a pen. You have removed the need for easily lost caps. Replace the rotary dial on a telephone with buttons and you eliminate the finger yoga and frustration associated with making a phone call. Some people still have a fascination with the old way, but these new technologies catch on quickly due to their inherent speed and usability.

One everyday item that has yet to jump the usability barrier is the daily cup of hot coffee or tea. There have been a flood of attempts to make these easier to use, including styrofoam cups, Java Jackets, and my personal favorite, the plastic lid. These lids retain heat, become soft and change shape, and force you to drink through a tiny hole that focuses the burning liquid onto one spot in your mouth. Due to their lack of usability, these lids now have warnings embedded all over them, thankfully included in braille for the blind. That is, providing they want to get second degree burns on their fingertips to find out the liquid inside is hot.

Enter Dynamic Textures. April Tsui has invented a new material that, when activated by heat or pressure, translates two dimensional patterns into three dimensional shapes. The result is a cup that emulates a pufferfish, with spikes that stick out, not allowing you to grab the cup and pour the possibly scalding liquid onto your tongue until it has reached a cool enough temperature to drink.

As effective as this is, some people may have an aversion to this technique, particularly those that hold their coffee between their legs on the morning commute. Thankfully, she also offers a more subtle approach to making sure you don’t accidentally pour your drink all over yourself. This variation of the material stays two dimensional until you have the lid on your cup securely. When your beverage is safe, the material pushes out to form the grips used to hold and enjoy your morning refreshment.

While these may currently be experimental projects, considering how many times I have been fooled by a cup into thinking it wasn’t a dribble glass, I would love having the latter design on my desk. Meanwhile, April has been working with NASA to translate these textures onto Aerogel, which could have some amazing new implications.

They may not know what the full possibilities are of combining these futuristic directions, but they know it’s worth looking at. It’s worth the time and effort of exploring and rethinking what they have in order to find solutions that are exponentially better. By spending the time to look at the objects and solutions you use every day, you can end up revolutionizing everyday life.