Apps are too complex so maybe features should be ownable and tradable

18.18, Friday 29 Apr 2022

Software is too complicated. User interfaces have too many commands. Perhaps the answer is an in-app free market economy.


I subscribe to the excellent Hardcore Software newsletter which narrates the evolution of the PC and desktop software. It’s by Steven Sinofsky who was at Microsoft from 1989, oversaw development of multiple versions of Microsoft Office as it was created and scaled, and ended up as president of the Windows devision.

With Office 2003, Microsoft was able to see the actual commands used for the first time.

  • There were 4,000 commands across all of Office 2003 (Word, Excel, etc)
  • 80% of users only used two commands: copy and paste

Nobody used all the features, but everyone used a different set.

At a deeper level, most in a company might not use a feature such as Track Changes (or Redlining) in Word. But their lawyer would. And contracts or legal letters might arrive via email for review. Rarely used features became part of the work of others. This network of usage was a key advantage of Office.

What to do?


I’m into Adaptive Menus as an approach.

The first new mechanism, called “Adaptive Menus” or, later, “Personalized Menus” were an attempt to make the top-level menus appear shorter by showing the most popular items first. After a few seconds (or after pushing a chevron at the bottom of the menu) the menu expanded to show the full contents. As you used the menus, items you used often were promoted to the “short” menu and items you never used were demoted to the “long” menu.

It’s like frequently-used light switches in your house magically getting bigger.

But it didn’t help for Microsoft’s core problem which was discoverability. Users kept on requesting features which were already in the product.

(The eventually solution was to replace menus with visible commands and icons, making it easier to explore: the Ribbon.)


Kai’s Power Tools, in the mid 1990s, was known for providing awesome Photoshop effects and also for wild experiments with the UI.

Here’s a deep dive into the interface of KPT.

Magic lenses! Single-purpose rooms! A dedicated tool meant to create collections of special looking orbs.

Also, “Unfolding Functionality.”

This deep dive describes this philosophy as fading out commands when not needed.

But the KPT Wikipedia page is more specific:

The program interface features a reward-based function in which a bonus function is revealed as the user moves towards more complex aspects of the tool.

This is more how I remember it.

I think what would happen is that you would use a particular feature or filter or parameter, and as you used it you would accumulate stars. At a certain number of stars, more advanced features would unlock.

Which is another way to deal with clutter, right? It’s progressive disclosure: the user and interface grow in sophistication together.


Neither Office’s Adaptive Menus nor KPT’s Unfolding Functionality is quite right. (Discovering new features is hard. A feature, when you want to go back to it, might be a different place.)

BUT what they both do is they atomise functionality.

Once functions and commands exist as atoms, the user interface can be displayed according to some kind of logic - unfolded with use; reorganised by context, etc.


Feature flags are a super common engineering pattern for turning feature “atoms” on and off dynamically.

For example: you have an app with a button that you only want to show to people inside the company, because the feature is still being tested. So you set a flag for that feature for all the users who you want to see the button, and they see it, and for everyone else it’s like the feature isn’t even there.

Unpacking this… Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags) (Pete Hodgson) gives four categories of feature flags:

  • Release toggles – allows half-finished code to be shipped so select people can try it out live
  • Experiment toggles – features can be activated dynamically for one group or another, to gather data in a A/B test
  • Ops toggles – allows compute-intense features to be easily deactivated when the service is under load
  • Permissioning toggles – premium features are available to the premium group of users; beta features are available only to users who can test the system, and so on.

Kai’s Power Tools, through the lens of feature flags, makes up a fifth category: adaptive toggles.

I’m calling them adaptive in the spirit of the lost Adaptive Design movement from the early 2000s: software is “adaptive” if it is co-created by design and user, and conforms to individual user behaviour.

A sixth category might be pick-your-own toggles: feature flags where the user is in control of what features are off and what features are on.


BUILD #1: Pick-your-own feature flags

This is 50% of an idea.

Imagine Microsoft Word but it comes as a plain text editor. No bold/italic/etc. The only commands are open, save, copy, and paste.

You get used to it. Then one day you decide you’d like to style some text… or, better, you receive a doc by email that uses big text, small text, bold text, underlined text, the lot.

What the hey? you say.

There’s a notification at the top of the document. It says: Get the Styles palette to edit styled text here, and create your own doc with styles.

You tap on the notification and it takes you to the Pick-Your-Own Feature Flag Store (name TBC). You pick the “Styles palette” feature and toggle it ON.

So far this is pretty much like the browser flags in Chrome – experimental features in the web browser are hidden behind toggles which are user opt-in.

BUT the difference is that the features aren’t experimental. They are fully-rounded, user-facing, feature “package.”

So the user builds up the capabilities of the app as they go.

The downside? It’s still really hard to discover features. How do you know that text styles (or drawing, or collaboration, or any other feature “package”) is available, unless you go hunting? And why would you go hunting if you don’t already know the feature exists.

That’s why it’s only half an idea.


BUILD #2: Multiplayer, purchasable, tradable, giftable feature flags

The thing is, we’re not in Microsoft Word, we’re in Google Docs – and it’s multiplayer.

I’ve been tracking the emerging multiplayer web for a while. The fact that our day-to-day work apps, like Slack, Notion, Figma, and Google Docs all have a sense of live presence of colleagues is a big deal. Pretty soon we’ll be able to take it for granted in any app. Presence and collaboration will also be part of any future-VR-based operating system – I’m convinced of that after recent VR headset mucking around.

So what if you’re collaborating with your lawyer in Google Docs, and you can see from their avatar that they have the “Track Changes” feature flag activated?

Because you’re in the same doc, you can use it together.

And maybe if you want to use it again, they can just… gift it to you?

Could app feature flags be tradable and giftable? That would answer the discovery problem and the “store” problem.

What we’re talking about is feature flag ownership: a user owns their feature flags, and they carry features with them in a multiplayer space, and can use them together with other people.

Which… kinda parallels the physical world, right?

Like: if you’re having a workshop in a meeting room, then it’s generally one person who brings the post-its and the pens. It’s part of their job.

It should be the same on a Zoom call. You shouldn’t sit on a call waiting for a host. You should sit on the call waiting for the person who has the screen share feature flag, and the annotate screen feature flag, and so on.

What I’m talking about here is a marketplace: maybe a bunch of features in Zoom are free, but you pay $10 for the screen share feature flag, or $100 if you want the “make my webcam look pretty” filter. You can gift it to another user later if you want.


BUILD #3: ok yeah NFTs

I continue to keep a close eye on web3, as I said in January:

Here and there are glimpses of new ways of storing files, new ways of owning and providing access to data, new ways of asserting identity, new forms of payments …

I keep a personal running list of what I find interesting in the Web3 gold rush, in the hope of spotting something useful in its fundamentals that has immediate applicability.

And maybe here’s one?

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are basically database primary keys that can be bought and sold, outside the originating platform.

What’s key about a NFT is that it is owned by a user.

Primary keys can point to anything, and mostly right now they point to jpegs of cartoon apes, pixellated portraits, blobs of text, and some very cool art made by excellent artists (also some terrible art). There are a ton of scams in this space, so you have to squint a little to see through.

There is also an idea called Functional NFTs which is when the primary key is meaningful to a particular app or service, and it unlocks feature.

Look, what I’m saying is: why not NFT-backed tradable feature flags?

With NFTs you get a whole ecosystem of ownership, marketplaces, dynamic pricing, for-free and for-pay trading, and so on.

If you want to build ownable, tradable feature flags, then it’s actually a relatively sane architecture decision to make use of this chunk of the emerging web3 tech stack to provide it. You might (as the rest of the tech stack comes into play) end up actually having to write less code?

Maybe the ownership experience of NFT-backed feature flags would actually be greater than non-NFT-backed feature flags, and you would be able to charge more? Expensive to provide features (like ones that consume a lot of bandwidth) could even cost more. Applications could end up with a business model that feels more like game DLC?

…but with some fascinating behaviour around users optimising their own apps around different roles (a viewer, a host, a facilitator, an editor, a teacher, etc) to represent the roles they have in their teams, and - in this multiplayer world - mutually learn from one another about how to adapt and co-create their own user interfaces.

3rd party marketplaces to provide and trade feature flags would arise.

And then there should be some fun features too. It’s not all whiteboards. What would it mean to have a rare and therefore somehow valuable feature flag? What would it feel like to be gifted one?

For me, this is maybe something to draw out of web3 – either just as inspiration or actually as some real tech.


Anyway. Adaptive user interfaces, avoiding clutter, adding social discovery, NFT-backed feature flags. Apps would start really simple and then grow in complexity around you as you discover features by meeting others. Add in a business model and it sounds like a real-world economy, right? Lots of user experience and design work to figure it out. Can you imagine Microsoft Office 2026 working like this? Something worth sketching I think.


Thanks to Sofi Lee-Henson, Pearl Pospiech, and others at Sparkle for the work and imagination in developing these thoughts together. Standard disclaimer: this is super speculative. Posting now to generating conversation and get my thoughts lined up.

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