3 Questions You Must Ask Before Killing Features

Earlier today, Alex Limi shared a post, Checkboxes that kill your product, on the necessity to simplify products and remove (often crusty) functionality. While I mostly agree with Alex’s arguments, I take issue with the following statement:

“Is it really worth having a preference panel that benefits fewer than 2% of users overall?"— obvious spoiler alert: The answer is no.

Even though a feature may be used by only a small percentage of users[1], it’s foolish and irresponsible to blindly remove it without first asking these three questions:

1. Will my product effectively break or become significantly less useful for these users if removed?
2. Why aren’t more people using this feature? Is it too hidden? Do people not understand its purpose?
   
   
3. Is this feature ahead of the market and do I anticipate more adoption as users become more sophisticated?

It’s easy to kill features in the (trendy) name of simplicity but do so carefully.

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[1] Marcelo Calbucci recently wrote a related piece on the importance of minority, power users in Google is about to learn a tough lesson