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May 8, 2006
Business 2.0: Simple Minds
For those of you who didn't camp out at the newsstand to get this a month ago, here is my Business 2.0 column from an issue back. It's on why simplicity has become a cult in technology, and why said cult has things precisely wrong.The simplicity cult has it wrong. From industrial design to software, it's become accepted wisdom that products must be made simpler. It's not true.As you might imagine, my email responses on this one have been entertainingly all over the map.
...The current obsession with simplicity beats making products stupidly complex. But it's built on at least one false premise, that less is more. More is more, and it always has been and always will be. Good products can and should be feature-rich, laden with information, and easy to use.
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The goal should be for products to appear simple but be deep.
Or, as you put it in your article, "The solution is to have more features and more information in ways that are less intrusive and more carefully prioritized."
I really like your thesis (especially for tech minded consumers like myself), but I do have one question regarding the applicability to the average user. When you say that a product should have as many features as possible with the caveat that they not get in the way, I start to wonder how that's possible. If a device has a feature that someone could potentially find useful how does a user know whether they're the chosen one or not? They have to look through the full list of features and see what's out there (or in there, in this case) to make sure that something they could make use of is, well, made use of. All this leaves the person faced with potentially complicated options.
This reminds me of going to the pharmacy to buy toothpaste. Ever tried to choose between Crest with fluoride or whitening or both or none and the other myriad of "features"? It's not fun because the average consumer gets overloaded easily and when it comes to technology that's intensified. Therefore, I think you can't just hide features out of the way, hence a product can't offer too many of them or else its users might start brushing their teeth with soap.
Just to be clear though, I love the idea of "more"; I'm just wondering how to give it without the giving of it becoming a problem.
But what's the tradeoff? The question is not "should products be more capable," but "should products be more capable, if it takes away from other aspects of the product?" Auto airbags add ~ $500 to the price of the car, which as a form of insurance is money well spent. But in software, more features ===>more bugs, longer time to market, etc.
I think everyone will agree with the statement that features should be added " in ways that are less intrusive and more carefully prioritized." This goes back, at least, to Donald Norman's first book. But consider a particular tradeoff: "Should X percent of development effort go into a UI that is clean and unobtrusive, or should it go into adding more features?" The advocates of simplicity will say the first one, on the margin.
Another version of this question: should product release be delayed until more capability is added, or should Version 1.0 go out with the key capabilities, and others get added later? Look at the Apple 12 month cycles on OS upgrades, versus the Microsoft 5 year cycles.
Not to say that there are universal answers; everything is market/situation specific. But to paraphrase Stalin, "Simplicity has a quality all its own."