The Dangers of Over-Engineering

Every product you may or may not have come across goes through a process (or processes) before it becomes a finished product that is usable by consumers or customers. These processes are usually industry-specific and in most cases, companies deem them necessary since they want to come out with innovative, high quality and highly competitive product. This need to come out with something innovative and competitive can sometimes lead product designers and managers to bloat the process involved in development as well as bloat the final product with too many unnecessary features that may end up impacting the user experience negatively.

Meaning of Over-Engineering

Over-engineering is the act of designing a product to be more robust or have more features than often necessary for its intended use, or for a process to be unnecessarily complex or inefficient.
Overengineering is often done to increase the feeling of safety by the product architects or designers, add functionality, or overcome perceived design flaws that most users would accept. 
As a design philosophy, it is the opposite of the minimalist ethos of “less is more” and occurs in high-end products or specialized markets.
 

Dangers of Over-Engineering

Over-engineering has several disadvantages starting from the process down to the final product. Some of the disadvantages are highlighted below;

• Products Become More Expensive

Over-engineered products have more features and parts than necessary for example a city car with a 300mph top speed or a messaging app with an embedded file manager. This eventually leads to an increased cost on the final product because it will cost the company more money to produce. The company also stands a risk of losing more money if the product fails to gain traction
 

• Poor performance

 
Over-engineered products can in many cases have poor performance when compared to a product not over-engineered and this is especially true in software products because over-engineered software products are usually bloated with unnecessary features which usually reduces the performance.
 

• Usability Defects

 
This one is related to the previous point. Over-engineering can negatively impact the usability of a (software) product by overwhelming lesser experienced and technical literate end-users with too many unnecessary functions and features.
 

• Decreased Productivity

 
The productivity of design teams will be decreased and negatively impacted as they will need to build and maintain more features than most users need and also valuable time will be spent maintaining those features.

Conclusion

Over-engineering is something that is usually ignored by even the most experienced design and development teams but its effect could be the difference between successful and unsuccessful products. The best way to avoid it is to conduct a thorough market and target users analysis and even at that, features that don’t add anything to the final product should be identified and removed.