The Rise of Simplicity in Product Design and Customer Relationships
Nov 24th, 2007 by Dan Blank
Daniel Eran Dilger posted a review of why Microsoft’s Zune music player has failed, and will continue to fail. In his piece, he had one nugget that speaks to the new relationship between producers and consumers:
“Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand the engineering art of leaving things out. Instead of making tough choices, the company just loaded in apparent features that did very little.”
So many products seem to adhere to the classic “more is better” view of design. Give people more for their money. However, Apple and others have embraced the idea that people actually want a simple product that solves a problem for folks in an really easy to use manner.
As the “digital lifestyle” becomes more common among your average friend of family member, they are becoming more sophisticated in understanding which features are truly useful, and which are broken solutions that were tacked on as an afterthought.
Sounds nice in theory but maybe we can acknowledge that this simple thing is really hard and that the examples we tend to think of aren’t so stellar with flaws of their own. Nothing is simple about the fact that every 5 days or so I get an update notice from Apple about my iTunes and/or Quicktime. I hope I don’t need them b/c the simple thing to do is just skip them (and so I do). And I’m not sure how simple is that my iPod just fails one day and now it’s dead. Is “simple” now buying a new one - my old cd players works perfectly (simply) after 10 years.
We could try to stop using “simplicity” with every critical discussion of a product/experience. There certainly seems to be something interesting about the Zune’s intentions, or lack thereof, that gets neglected when we sum it up that it’s just not “simple” - were they just piling on features b/c buyers tend to crave bells and whistles and getting more for their money? Were they trying to provide new, unique capabilities but misunderstood what their audience wanted? I dunno. I’ve bought so much Apple stuff that my switching costs are too high to try the Zune.