As soon as the words left my mouth today I knew I had to write this.
We were discussing a particular site, and talking about how it was becoming cluttered and unusable (or rather, has been cluttered and unusable for some time). At that point I said that we were Fixing It With Addition, meaning that every time something went wrong the solution was to add something else instead of researching the cause of the problem.
It’s an issue that’s fairly abundant in all walks of life, not just the internerd. Your car’s not selling? Make it bigger, add more features, bigger engine, more power. A prime example of this was the Passat W8 of a few years ago. VW, and for this I think they are clever, developed a new W-shaped engine layout that meant you could fit eight cylinders into an engine compartment made for 6. It was a novel concept, but the problem here was that for all the extra power the W8 made over the V6, all it did was compensate for all the extra weight added by the motor itself.
FIWA’s best friend and partner in crime, I’m convinced, is DIBYC (Doing It Because You Can) and as you can see he made his presence known in that whole Passat situation.
Just because you can put a huge graphic across the top of your site to drive up sales doesn’t mean you should and definitely doesn’t mean it will. Maybe if your sales aren’t so hot you should consider a new marketing strategy and reexamine your target audience. Maybe they’re not buying because your site is too complicated? Maybe everything on the home page is equally vying for attention, and the decision of where they’re supposed to go just drove them away?
If that’s the case, maybe the ‘F’ in FIWA should stand for something else.