Brian Sweeting

“Conspicuous Consumption” is a term coined by the American economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899 to describe the consumption of expensive goods, commodities and services for the sake of displaying social status and wealth.  Basically it’s doing something extravagant only because you can.  How does this relate to interface design?  I’ve been test driving WordPress 2.0 beta, and I see some of this going on in the interface.

In the Presentation section of the administration control panel, there is a section called “Current Theme Options” (see screenshot) where the sole purpose is to change the colors in the header image. Now a person with little knowledge of HTML should be able to customize the colors of their site, but a whole section that is devoted to changing the colors of a single image and a couple lines of text? That my friends is “conspicuous consumption” in interface design.

Another example from the WordPress 2.0 beta, is in the writing interface. The WordPress team has tried to clean up the writing interface in a pretty big way. The problem is, that the current writing interface (see screenshot) is not that bad to begin with. One reason people choose WordPress over other blogging software, is because it gives you a lot of power. Therefore, there are quite a few options when writing a post. The clever thing about the current interface is that extraneous options are either hidden or “below the fold”. When I write a new post, the fields I see most prominently at the top of the page are title, excerpt, body, category, and finally I have the buttons: “Save as Draft”, “Save as Private”, “Publish”, and “Advanced Editing >>” (which exposes a bunch of extra things I can change about this post). Contrast that with the new WordPress 2.0 beta (see screenshot), they have put all the extraneous options for a post in the interface, but hide them until you click on them. Okay, so that’s okay, but the “we did it because we can” part is that I can re-organize the options by dragging and dropping them via javascript and AJAX. So now they are just giving me more work to do. The average person simply does not need that level of customization of their interface. Another case of “conspicuous consumption” in interface design.

So how do you know if you’re guilty of “conspicuous consumption” in your interface? Ask yourself this set of questions: “Will more than 20% of the people using this product even use this feature?”. “And if so, does that 20% need this feature in order to be productive with this product?” If the answer to the first is “No” or if the answer to the first is “Yes” and the answer to the second is “No”, then you are adding a feature just because you can.