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Keeping Your
Offerings Easy to Use (Part 2)
by Adele Sommers
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:
1. Designing offerings to function as simply
as possible, without adding busywork
2. Striving to support customers’ primary
goals, ideally through built-in guidance
3. Enabling customers to explore more complex features
only when they’re ready
4. 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 continue to maintain a highly successful but
extremely complex software product. The team is experiencing
this problem because the product had 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 set
increased the possible interactions within the system
almost exponentially! It thus had become too complex
to test or maintain, and equally challenging to use.
That's the problem
with complex systems — they can quickly 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, making
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 more complexity, consider whether
you can either hide it elegantly, or guide people through
it effortlessly and painlessly. Let these be your
next major goals, and I guarantee you’ll applaud
the results!
Copyright 2006 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 spring suggest to me?
I
recently read (or actually, listened to) the fascinating
bestseller “
“
