When the Right Design Decision Is to Do Nothing

Some of the most useful design work never makes it into a portfolio, because there’s nothing to show except a feature that didn’t get built and the argument for why. Try putting that on Dribbble.

Products pile up features, and each one makes sense on its own. Together they make everything harder to use. The pressure only goes one way, too. Nobody gets praised in the quarterly review for the feature they stopped.

Barry Schwartz’s research on choice is useful here. More options tend to make people less satisfied and slower to decide, even when every option is good. In product terms, a dashboard with twenty filters tells the user that twenty things might matter, and then leaves them to work out which.

On a marketplace analytics product, a request came in for benchmark toggles on every chart, so partners could compare themselves to platform averages. In the meeting it sounded completely sensible, and I said no. Partners were still learning to read their own numbers. A comparison would have turned "what’s happening with my business" into "how do I compare", which is a different task the product wasn’t built for yet. It went into the backlog with a clear condition for when to revisit it.

Saying no in that meeting is uncomfortable, and "let’s keep it simple" never works, because it sounds lazy. What works is being specific about which task the feature interrupts and what would need to be true for it to belong.

That means you need a clear enough picture of what the product is for to judge a feature by what it costs, and most teams don’t have that written down anywhere. Writing it down is design work too, even if it never becomes a screen.

Tamara Milakovic is a senior product designer specialising in B2B SaaS, design systems, and the decisions upstream of the brief.