This time it wasn’t curiosity that did it. Complexity is a challenge, especially in business and product development. Take Apple, a company that prides itself on making things as simple and lacking complexity as possible. The iPhone has one button on the front. Customizations and “hacks” are minimally available in iOS. All of the devices look similar (iPad, iPod, iPhone) and they all sync effortlessly. People love this and pay a ridiculous premium for it. Customers want something sleek and simple.
Now on the other end of the spectrum was the product that Kirill Klimuk and I built last summer. It had a gazillion bells and whistles, months worth of coding features and oh man was it confusing and complex. The inner workings were indeed brilliant (props to Kirill there), but the average user looked at it and said, “HUH???” That’s bad, because they didn’t end up being our user for very long.
When I was working on that product, I overlooked an important piece of advice from my friend and mentor Maria Cirino, the Managing Director of .406 Ventures. She told me something along the lines of “every feature or complexity represents a failure point in your product. You want to eliminate as many of those failure points as possible. If one point fails, the whole product can go down.” Successful products need to be built minimally: less features, less functionality, less complexity. There should be one button that does the same thing every time, and every user understands what the button does.
The same should be applied to service delivery. The less materials, less people and less time that we can tweak the service down to, the better. When we are crafting a marketing campaign at influencers@, the creative team always seeks things that are exciting, effective and yet brilliantly simple to execute. Consider ways to reduce complexity in your business… your customers and bottom line will be a lot happier.