Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder. This spiral of complexity, often called "feature creep," costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money.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. Companies now know a great deal about problems of usability and consumer behavior, so why is it that feature creep proves unstoppable? In part, feature creep is 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, and what engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what"s best for consumers. The engineers tend not to notice when more options make a product less usable. And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers. You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that"s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It"s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity. It seems odd that we don"t anticipate feature fatigue and thus avoid it. But, as numerous studies have shown, people are not, in general, good at predicting what will make them happy in the future. As a result, we will pay more for more features because we systematically overestimate how often we"ll use them. We also overestimate our ability to figure out how a complicated product works. The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies.A product that doesn"t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMWs original iDrive system did.
单选题
In the first paragraph, the author mainly discusses _____.