In an article published by the American newspaper "New York Times", writer Shira Ovid said that there are many settings in our phones that we may never use.

And companies, including Apple, are offering this week new options to make their devices look great and improved, including deleting the text message you regret sending, while the Mac computer will be able to use the iPhone's camera to make video calls, and you will be able to change the color of one of the icons. Android apps to match your phone screen.

But the vast majority of people will not use these features.

One tech expert stated that only a small percentage of people tweak the original features of their hardware or software, and most people avoid constantly fiddling with the great feature settings of phones, TVs, and laptops.

3 reasons to increase unused features

So why do companies keep adding features that only benefit a few people, and is there a better way to design products?

Cliff Kwang, a designer in the technology industry and author of a book on the history of product design, identified 3 reasons why these features are constantly on the rise.

First

: companies add these options because they help them in marketing their products as new and exciting.

Second

, products that are used by millions of users must appeal to people with different needs on a large scale, and we are surprised by options that look great but we can't or can't use them.

Third,

users are unable to distinguish between "what looks good and what they really need".

Technicians often complain that they don't always succeed in product design, as loyal users demand more and more options that often don't make sense in relation to the norm.

This is one reason why technology often seems to be made for the 1% of digital fanatics and not for the rest of the world.

The writer pointed out that if companies try to reduce the options that are underused or change anything that people have previously been accustomed to, some users will hate it.

Stephen Sinofsky, the former CEO of Microsoft, said that reviewing widely used software such as Windows was tantamount to ordering pizza for a billion people around the world.

Experts say that only a small percentage of people modify the original features of their devices or software (Anatolia)

Clive Thompson, technology writer at The New York Times Magazine, said that companies should decide in advance what set of features they want to work on and stop once that is achieved, noting that Instagram, for example, is a product that gets worse the more options are added to it.

The writer added that the products cannot remain as they were in the past, and some features, such as the feature of emergency services automatically in car accidents, may be useful even if they are not used frequently, because it is difficult to know which of the additional functions may be useful to users.

How do you prepare for changes to your phone?

Regardless of whether all the features are useful or not, you will soon be using the latest software for your phone.

Brian Chen, a consumer technology columnist for the New York Times, spoke about how to prepare for this change.

The writer reviewed the new changes this fall to smartphones within the operating system updates for Apple and Google.

In order to prepare for this, the author advises, first, not to install any early beta version of currently available software, because these incomplete versions of operating systems are still being checked for defects.

But here's how to configure your phone to receive the new operating systems when they're ready:

  • Back up your phone data to another device, such as your computer, or to a cloud storage service, and this will help you avoid a disaster if something goes wrong when you update your phone software.

  • Turn off automatic updates.

    Go to your phone's settings and select "Automatically install software updates after bedtime", and disable this feature.

  • And in the fall, a wait-and-see approach should be taken to assess what others are saying online about any major errors that may arise.

  • New products are usually incomplete on the first day, so install the new operating system manually when you are confident that it will not harm your phone.

  • Take the opportunity to do some digital cleaning and delete apps you no longer use and files you no longer need. Sometimes new operating systems take up more space than their predecessors, so it's best to do some cleaning beforehand to ensure a fresh start.