Remember that feeling? The one where you log into a familiar SaaS tool, one you’ve used happily for months, maybe years, only to be hit with a wave of unfamiliarity. A simple action, like creating a task or adding a contact, suddenly requires navigating through a labyrinth of new fields, dropdowns, and “advanced” options you never asked for. It’s like your favorite coffee shop suddenly decided to offer 40 different types of obscure artisanal beans, making it impossible to just get a decent latte.
I recently found myself in this exact scenario. A project management tool, once a daily companion, now felt like a stranger. To create a task, I was presented with 14 fields, 6 dropdowns, and a “Quick add” button that opened yet another modal with 8 more choices. The simple act of typing text and hitting enter, which used to be front and center, was now tucked away behind an “Advanced settings” menu. Why? Because the product had accumulated dependencies, automations, AI suggestions, sprint planning, and about forty other features I didn’t need or want for that basic action.
I closed the tab. I opened a text file. Text files, bless their hearts, don’t have product roadmaps. That, I realized, is their main feature.
The Weight of Ambition: When “More” Becomes “Less”
This isn’t an isolated incident; it’s a pervasive trend. We’ve collectively witnessed an era where adding options became the default, the only option, even. Another day, another CRM. I needed to add one contact – a name and an email. The “Add Contact” button presented a dropdown: Add Contact. Add Company. Add Deal. Add Contact + Company. Add Contact + Deal. Add Company + Deal. Add All Three. Quick Add (which, ironically, wasn’t the quickest).
Eight options, just to save one person’s information. It took me 40 seconds to decipher which path wouldn’t trigger a workflow, create a pipeline stage, or notify someone’s sales team that I’d made a strategic account decision by merely typing “Alex” and pressing enter. This isn’t thoughtful feature design; it’s what I’ve come to call “product cowardice.” It’s an inability to decide what truly matters, dressed up as flexibility and user choice.
The harsh truth is: a product that attempts to do everything often defaults to doing nothing simply.
The Silent Signals of Feature Bloat
Every new section in your navigation sends a clear, if unspoken, message: “We’re no longer sure what you’re here for.” Twenty settings for a single feature scream: “We built something confusing and decided configuration was cheaper than clarity.” When you see “Basic” and “Advanced” modes, it’s an admission: “We know this is too much, but we shipped it anyway and made you choose your pain level.”
A Settings page that requires its own internal navigation is a monument to complexity. It says, “Congratulations! We’ve built a product inside your product.” And that “Getting started” checklist that never quite dismisses? That’s your product team subtly telling you, “We’ve added so much that even we don’t think you’ll figure it out on your own.”
Users don’t typically email angry complaints about this. They just ghost. They silently drift away, seeking simpler shores, or perhaps, opening a trusty text file.
The Slow Erosion of Simplicity: A Real-Time Decay
I’ve had a front-row seat to this degradation. I watched one project management tool evolve over four years, not as an auditor, but as a daily user. It went from being an essential part of my workflow to a frustrating obstacle.
Year 1: Five core actions. Create task, assign, complete, comment, share. It was clean, intuitive. Activation rates were high, around 73%. I recommended it to everyone I knew.
Year 2: Dependencies were added. Then sprint planning. Then time tracking. Then custom fields. The “Create task” button now offered a choice: Quick add or detailed? (Quick opened a modal with 8 fields; Detailed had 14.) Activation dipped to 68%. My recommendations became less enthusiastic.
Year 3: The “power user features” arrived. Custom views. A template library. Workflow automation. Advanced filters. The Settings page grew so long it needed collapsible panels. Support costs climbed 40%. Activation dropped to 61%. My recommendations started to include caveats: “It’s powerful, but it has a learning curve.”
Year 4: I watched a new user try to create their first task. It took them 90 seconds to find the right button. They asked, “Where’s just… type and press enter?” It was there, alright. Hidden behind “Advanced settings,” because “advanced” had quietly become the default, and “simple” was demoted to legacy behavior. Activation hit 54%.
Year 5: A major redesign was announced. “Simplifying everything,” they claimed. What it translated to was moving 80% of existing features to new locations, removing zero features, and adding three more for good measure. Activation slumped to 51%. I stopped recommending it altogether. The text file became my preferred project manager.
The product didn’t break in a catastrophic way. It just kept “winning” internal feature debates, one by one, until its foundational simplicity disappeared under a mountain of additions. Every feature had a champion. Every one was used by someone. But the core job now required navigating past seventeen adjacent jobs the product had learned to do, obscuring its original purpose.
Reclaiming Clarity: What Truly Works in SaaS Design
The good news is that we know what works, and it’s often the inverse of the prevailing trend. It’s about intentionality and ruthless prioritization.
Prioritizing the Obvious Path
I once consulted for a CRM that buried “Add contact” three clicks deep. Contacts > New > Contact (not Company). When we moved it to a persistent header button, activation jumped 23% in two weeks. Why? Because we stopped hiding what mattered most to users.
Design for Depth, Not Default Complexity
Consider Notion. Power users can build intricate databases with relations and formulas. Yet, casual users see pages and can remain in that simple interface forever. It’s the same product, offering different depths, but nobody is forced into complexity they don’t need. The power lies in making advanced features ignorable without knowing they even exist.
The Discipline of Defaults and Deletion
An analytics platform I encountered had 34 settings for data refresh rates. Thirty-four! Usage data showed 91% of users stuck with the default. The other 33 settings were solving problems for, perhaps, seventeen people. That’s not comprehensive; that’s hoarding edge cases, at the cost of everyone else’s cognitive load.
Navigation should reflect jobs, not internal org charts. If you have 12 top-level navigation items, you likely don’t have comprehensive features; you have an information architecture problem with a product marketing name. Users came to do five things. Show them five things.
Then there’s subtraction, the ultimate craft. Basecamp famously removes features below adoption thresholds every six months. No grandfathering. They archive it, watch if anyone screams. Usually, they don’t. And when they do, you learn if those few vocal users are worth the complexity cost for everyone else. (They usually aren’t.)
Is Your Product the Problem? Simple Tests for Complicated Truths
Want to know if your product is silently pushing users away? Here are a few quick checks:
The Two-Minute Test
Find a new user. Ask them to complete the most common task in your product. No tutorial, no hand-holding. Start a timer. Under two minutes? Your core workflow is clear. Over two minutes with “where do I…?” questions? Something’s blocking obvious value. Ninety seconds of clicking around before giving up? You’ve buried your purpose under capabilities.
I’ve run this test on seventeen products. Twelve failed. Every failure had double-digit navigation items.
The Return User Reorientation
Ask someone who used your product regularly six months ago to complete their old frequent task. Watch how long they need to reorient. Under 30 seconds? Muscle memory intact. Over 90 seconds? They’re relearning. If they open Google to search for how to do it, you’ve made a simple thing complicated.
Adoption Forensics
Pull your analytics. List every feature shipped in the last 18 months. Note their adoption rates. Be honest. If five features are below 15% adoption, you’re building for hypothetical users. If your most-used features are still from version 1.0, everything since has likely added weight, not value. If last year’s features are adopted faster than three-year-old ones, you might be trend-chasing instead of job-serving.
The data doesn’t lie about what matters. Your roadmap, however, very well might.
The Path to Simple: Removing, Not Just Reorganizing
If your SaaS product feels harder to use than it did two years ago, it’s not because your users suddenly got less patient. Your product got more ambitious. Every capability adds friction, even valuable ones. Especially valuable ones that serve 11% of your audience while confusing the other 89%.
The real question isn’t “should we build this?” It’s “should we add this to everything already there, knowing it will make the simple path longer for most people?”
The answer, more often than not, is to start removing. Not reorganizing. Not redesigning the navigation. Removing. Archive features below 10% adoption. Collapse redundant sections. Delete settings with 95%+ default rates. Make the thing do less so your users can do more without having to think about your product’s entire capability surface.
Your product isn’t a museum catalog of everything you’ve shipped. It’s a tool for jobs. The more you add, the more you obscure which jobs actually matter. Adding features is easy; every product manager can justify their roadmap item, every stakeholder can explain why their ask matters. Choosing what *not* to include – that’s expensive. That requires saying no to genuinely good ideas because they would make the core experience worse for most users. Simple isn’t simple. Simple is expensive discipline applied consistently over years. But simple is also the only thing that scales without eventually breaking under its own weight. And maybe – just maybe – if your product got simple enough, users would close their text files and open yours instead.
