Trust me, you won’t use that new function on your iPhone

It happens like clockwork. Companies, including Apple this month, introduce new options to make their gadgets feel new and improved.

Soon you’ll be able to zap that text message you sent but regretted! A Mac computer will be able to use an iPhone camera for video calls! You can change the colour tint of Android app icons to match the rest of your screen!

And like clockwork, a vast majority of people won’t use these features.

Tech experts told me that only a small percentage of people adjust anything about how their electronics or software come from the manufacturer. Most of us are not tinkering constantly with settings for the fancy features of phones, TVs and laptops.

Why, then, do companies keep adding functions that are handy for a tiny number of people and ignored by the rest? And is there a better way to design products?

Cliff Kuang, a designer in the tech industry and an author of a book about the history of product design, singled out three culprits behind ever-growing features. First, companies add options because it helps them market their products as new and exciting. Second, products with many millions of users must appeal to people with widely different needs. And — this one stings — we are infatuated with options that seem great but that we can’t or won’t use.

We are infatuated with options that seem great but that we can’t or won’t use.

Kuang described this third factor as the “the inability of users to distinguish between ‘Hey, that looks good’ and ‘Hey, I need that.’”

If it makes you feel better, Kuang said he’s guilty of this, too. He was wowed by a feature in his Tesla to automate parallel parking. “The first time I used it, it was cool,” he said. “And I never used it again.”