Customer Experience: Simplicity vs. Functionality

When building complex software its easy to forget about simplicity for the sake of functionality. A web service like twitter does one thing. you post a short message about what you are doing. there are only so many ways your can present the user interface to allow for that. twitter has a simple interface because its functionally simple in what it does. Facebook gets more complex in what you can do and therefore the interface is more complicated and as tools get more sophisticated its easy to make the simplicity of using them harder to understand. Ideally each function you add to a software application should be as easy to use as the first one. Just because your service provides lots of cool features does not mean it cannot have a simple interface for each one of those features. if you were to graph simplicity vs. functionality you would see that simplicity decreases as functionality increases. some products like the iPhone have focused heavily on simplicity even when great amounts of functionality have been provided. Other products like Adobe photoshop just assume you want the functionality no matter how hard it is to figure it out.