ore complex features only when they're ready -- Making all elements of a product or system fully compatible and consistent

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Where should you draw the line between simplicity and complexity when creating or enhancing your products or services? Especially when customers are asking for new enhancements

Striving for simplicity in the design of our products and services is a major step we can take toward ensuring customer satisfaction, boosting our bottom line, and keeping our relationships smooth and headache-free.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored a formula for customer happiness -- through the lens of what makes customers unhappy. One reason for customer frustration is that over time, many products and services tend to evolve, eventually becoming too complicated and difficult to use. In Part 2 (this article), we'll probe more deeply into how to reverse this trend by simplifying what we have to offer.

A Quick Review of the Ease-of-Use Basics

In Part 1, we recognized that consumers expect our offerings to work exactly as advertised. Yet our products and services can introduce complex requirements and burdens of their own, some of which can even prevent customers from doing what they were trying to accomplish in the first place! When this occurs, buyers not only fail to become "raving fans," they often take their business elsewhere without ever telling us why.

We then explored four ease-of-use considerations:

-- Designing offerings to function as simply as possible, without adding busywork -- Striving to support customers' primary goals, ideally through built-in guidance -- Enabling customers to explore more complex features only when they're ready -- Making all elements of a product or system fully compatible and consistent

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Where should you draw the line between simplicity and complexity when creating or enhancing your products or services? Especially when customers are asking for new enhancements

appy. One reason for customer frustration is that over time, many products and services tend to evolve, eventually becoming too complicated and difficult to use. In Part 2 (this article), we'll probe more deeply into how to reverse this trend by simplifying what we have to offer.

A Quick Review of the Ease-of-Use Basics

In Part 1, we recognized that consumers expect our offerings to work exactly as advertised. Yet our products and services can introduce complex requirements and burdens of their own, some of which can even prevent customers from doing what they were trying to accomplish in the first place! When this occurs, buyers not only fail to become "raving fans," they often take their business elsewhere without ever telling us why.

We then explored four ease-of-use considerations:

-- Designing offerings to function as simply as possible, without adding busywork -- Striving to support customers' primary goals, ideally through built-in guidance -- Enabling customers to explore more complex features only when they're ready -- Making all elements of a product or system fully compatible and consistent

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Where should you draw the line between simplicity and complexity when creating or enhancing your products or services? Especially when customers are asking for new enhancements

1, we recognized that consumers expect our offerings to work exactly as advertised. Yet our products and services can introduce complex requirements and burdens of their own, some of which can even prevent customers from doing what they were trying to accomplish in the first place! When this occurs, buyers not only fail to become "raving fans," they often take their business elsewhere without ever telling us why.

We then explored four ease-of-use considerations:

-- Designing offerings to function as simply as possible, without adding busywork -- Striving to support customers' primary goals, ideally through built-in guidance -- Enabling customers to explore more complex features only when they're ready -- Making all elements of a product or system fully compatible and consistent

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Where should you draw the line between simplicity and complexity when creating or enhancing your products or services? Especially when customers are asking for new enhancements

fans," they often take their business elsewhere without ever telling us why.

We then explored four ease-of-use considerations:

-- Designing offerings to function as simply as possible, without adding busywork -- Striving to support customers' primary goals, ideally through built-in guidance -- Enabling customers to explore more complex features only when they're ready -- Making all elements of a product or system fully compatible and consistent

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Where should you draw the line between simplicity and complexity when creating or enhancing your products or services? Especially when customers are asking for new enhancements

ore complex features only when they're ready -- Making all elements of a product or system fully compatible and consistent

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Where should you draw the line between simplicity and complexity when creating or enhancing your products or services? Especially when customers are asking for new enhancements left and right -- demanding endless features and options -- how do you know when it's time to rein in the expansion and revert back to basics? Isn't the goal to give customers everything they ask for? Won't that make them happy?

The easiest way I can think of to draw the line between simplicity and complexity is along two relative dimensions:

-- Making sure the system is easy to use from your customers' point of view, such as by repeatedly testing the interface design with representative users.

-- Making sure the system is easy to maintain and test from your point of view. Unfortunately, there's no single alarm bell that goes off to warn everyone that a system has become too complicated to manage. Consider evaluating these angles each time you plan to upgrade your offerings, since over-complexity is a phenomenon that can easily overtake us.

To gain even more insight into this problem from an intriguing point of view, I recommend a book called "Necessary But Not Sufficient" by Eli Goldratt. It's an enjoyable example of a type of writing called "business fiction" -- because it lets fabricated characters explore a puzzling business problem and gradually discover the many sides of the solution. A main theme of this book exposes why an exceedingly competent software development team suddenly cannot figure out how to conti