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Keeping Your Products and Services Simple and Sweet
by Adele Sommers
Did you know that striving for
simplicity in the design of your products and services
is a major step you can take toward ensuring customer
satisfaction? By focusing tenaciously on this goal, you can boost your bottom line and keep
your customer relationships smooth and headache-free.
Imagine a formula for
customer happiness through the lens of
what tends to make customers unhappy. One common reason
for customer frustration is that over time, many products
and services that once worked simply and easily can become more complex. As their features and functions expand, they can become too
complicated and difficult to use. This article suggests how to reverse
this trend by continuously simplifying what you have to offer.
A Quick Review
of the Ease-of-Use Basics
 Have you thought about how we, as consumers, expect the things we buy to work exactly as anticipated?
Yet many products
and services don't help us at all. They introduce complex requirements and
burdens of their own. Some of them even prevent
us from doing what we were trying to accomplish
in the first place.
We can become so distracted by make-work tasks -- such as installing, setting up, learning, configuring,
troubleshooting, and contacting customer support -- that we aren't ever able to complete the actual work we had started off to do!
When this situation occurs,
we buyers fail to become “raving fans.” Further,
we often take our business elsewhere without ever
telling the sellers why.
You can avoid these problems in your own enterprise. Below are four
ease-of-use tips
that you can begin using when designing your own products and services:
1. Design your offerings as simply
as possible, without adding busywork.
2. Strive to support your customers’ primary
goals for doing their real jobs.
3. Enable people to explore more complex features
only when they’re ready.
4. Make all elements
of the product or system fully compatible and consistent.
Read on for additional ideas on how to balance simplicity and complexity...
Where Do You
Draw the Line?
 Where should you
draw the line between simplicity and complexity
when you create or enhance your products or services?
Especially when
customers are begging for new, advanced 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 simple to use from
your customers' point of view, such
as by repeatedly testing the interface design with
representative users.
- Making sure the system is simple to maintain and
test from your own 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,
as over-complexity can evolve into a phenomenon that can eventually
overwhelm you.
To gain even more
insight into this problem from an intriguing point of
view, I often recommend a book called, “Necessary
But Not Sufficient” by Eli Goldratt.
It’s an enjoyable example of a type of writing
called “business fiction.” 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 a highly competent
software development team suddenly cannot figure out
how to continue to maintain a hugely successful but
complex software product. The team is experiencing
this problem because the system has grown over time
to contain too much functionality.
That situation occurred
because (you guessed it!) customers kept asking for
more and more features. Each new feature increased the possible interactions within the system
almost exponentially! It therefore has become too complex
to test or maintain, and equally challenging to use.
That's the problem
with complex systems. They can ultimately reach a
point at which they contain too many combinations of
variables to validate in a lifetime, much less within
the time available to release the product!
How Do We Know
When Something Is as Easy to Use as Possible?
Often, we may try
to think about simplicity and ease of use in terms of
some kind of measurement. In that respect, ease
of use might mean making something easy to follow from
the standpoint of comprehension, for example, such as
a reading grade level. If we apply a reading comprehension
formula to our documents, we can find out how easily
people at a certain grade level can understand them.
 While
measurements are important tools that offer useful ways
to compare things, I would like to raise the bar even
higher -- much higher -- even if it sounds idealistic.
That is, I would like to have us consider what it would
take to make our products or services completely
transparent to our customers, as if our offerings
could act almost invisibly.
Imagine that each
time your customers use your offerings, it’s as
if they have a personal assistant working the
behind the scenes to do whatever the product or service
is supposed to do. Imagine that assistant or agent anticipating
what each customer needs to have done, and then doing
it, practically without being asked!
I realize that's
a tall order, and some people will surely feel that
you’d need some pretty fancy programming to make
anything work so transparently. But the next best thing
should sound more achievable. And that is, we can make
our offerings as self-guiding and foolproof
as possible.
In conclusion,
drawing the line between simplicity and complexity can
be difficult to do. Simplification brings many rewards.
But if you must add complexity, evaluate whether
you can either hide it elegantly, or guide people through
it effortlessly and painlessly. Let these be your next major goals, and I'll bet that your customers and audiences will applaud
the results!
Copyright 2010 Adele Sommers
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I'm
always captivated by the way the seasons suggest various
inspirations to ponder in the coming weeks and months.
So, what exactly does the transition to spring suggest to me?
If you haven't read the fascinating
bestseller, “
“
