When Simplicity costs More

This morning I needed to pay a bill for my daughters’ music lessons this term. When completing the form, I was given a number of options for payment, as we usually are. And, as we are becoming accustomed to, I was informed that if I chose to pay by credit card, there would be a 2% administration charge.

Now I know this vendor is only passing on the fee their bank is charging them, but it does seem to be an example of simplicity costing more. In order to avoid the 2% charge, I wrote and posted a cheque.

When my cheque gets to the other end, the music school will need to take it out of the envelope, fill out a deposit form by hand and physically visit the bank in order to deposit it. Bank staff will then process the cheque, sending it, eventually, back to my bank. In three to five days the funds will be cleared.

The simpler alternative – for both me and the vendor – would have been for me to use my credit card. They could have processed the payment in their office and had the funds same day. And the bank wouldn’t have touched the transaction as it would have happened automatically in the background.

But for this I would have had to pay more. In effect, the simple option is penalised and the complex one is rewarded.

The root of this problem is that the ‘cost’ of processing the credit card is tangible (at 2%) whereas the cost of processing the cheque is hidden – no one counts up how much time they spend filling in forms or travelling to the bank.

This is frequently the case, and is a common reason why simplicity all too often gets short shrift.

Does Simplicity have a Future?

This posting, my monthly article for Business Simplification, explores my previous posting in more depth, and from a slightly different perspective.

Simplicity is over-rated. At least that’s what a leading thinker on product design, Don Norman, wrote last month. He went further, saying “simplicity is a myth whose time has past [sic]”. So are those of us who believe in simplicity kidding ourselves? Is it worth pursuing or a waste of time and energy?

Norman presents a solid case that when it comes to comparing one product against another, most people will opt for the extra buttons and dials. In other words, complexity sells.

And we’ve all done it, haven’t we? We’ve all chosen appliances with extra features – even though we know deep down we probably won’t use them. It’s a bit like choosing the fries instead of an apple at McDonalds even though we know the latter would be better for us.

The problem is that emotion plays a large part in our buying choices. For lots of reasons, including “keeping up with the Jones’s” and the “what-if” factor, logic rarely gets much of a look-in.

So where does that leave simplicity? It’s certainly not out of style.

Wouldn’t you still prefer to deal with companies that are easy to deal with? Rather speak to a real person than a robot?

Wouldn’t you still choose a simple service over one that makes life more complicated. As I write, it is 40°C in Melbourne. I need to do some banking. I could use the internet. Or I could get into my hot car for a hot drive and join a hot queue for fifteen minutes. Mmmm…

And when it comes to actually using those feature-rich products, wouldn’t you prefer to program your video recorder in two minutes rather than twenty?

So simplicity has a place. And complexity does too. As usual, I suspect, the solution to this conundrum lies in striking the right balance. In fact, getting the balance just right can help you cut through the noise and really stand out.

Take Apple’s iPod. In a crowded electronics market, no other single product has dominated its market to the iPod’s extent. It gains new features each year, and they help it keep selling. But it remains a marvel of simplicity to use. The balance is just right.

Beyond technology, there are the classic board games like Scrabble, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. All have degrees of complexity: enough to keep them interesting. But all are simple to set up and learn as well. The balance is just right. The reward for their designers is longevity.

Then there are our politicians. They all deliver simple messages daily. But simplicity isn’t enough: mostly they don’t get heard. It’s the pollies who have sophisticated, well developed ideas which can be described with simplicity: they are the ones who cut through in the end.

Others have written that ‘Simply Complex’ or ‘Simplexity’ is the way of the future. I’m not sure that it is any more than good old ‘sophistication’. Either way, simplicity still has a place.

Simply Complex? Complicated Simplicity? What is Simplicity’s place in 2007?

A swag of recent articles have alluded to one of the big problems with the pursuit of simplicity: it doesn’t necessarily sell. Essentially (and at the risk of over-simplifying!) it is argued that people tend to opt for extra, usually complex, features over simplicity at the time of purchase – whether or not they use those features when they get the product home.

It is a valid point – there are few people out there marketing products with ‘less features’ (the iPod shuffle being a notable exception). But I still can’t concede that simplicity doesn’t have a place.

The best products and services manage to navigate the fine line between providing features to those who want them (or think they do, at the point of sale) and being easy to use and easy on the eye at the same time.

I would argue that the iPod is a good example of a device that meets both these requirements. On that other hand, we have a digital set-top box in our house which is so ‘simple’ that it can’t be operated without the remote control – this takes simplicity too far. Seems to me there is a balance to be struck here.

Piers Fawkes points out that a video or board game that is just ‘simple’ quickly becomes boring. Yet a game that is overly complex never gets played. The most successful board games have always been those that are simple to learn but offer endless interest: chess and Scrabble being the most obvious examples; Monopoly and Pictionary could be included too.

As Don Norman says: design presents wonderful challenges. And the challenge here, I think, is to balance simplicity with complexity in a way that gives the vendor the best result at the point of sale, and the user the best result when he or she gets the product home. None of that devalues simplicity – it just puts it into context.

A Benefit of Drought

Here in Melbourne, as in most of Australia, we are in the grip of a record drought. As a result, water restrictions are in place and watering the garden has to be done with a hose; no sprinklers allowed.

So there I was this morning, watering away, when I had a great idea. I’m not going to tell you the idea now (that will be a later piece of writing) but it did occur to me that if I hadn’t had to resort to ‘manual’ technology, maybe this idea wouldn’t have happened.

We often talk about the lack of time to think in the modern age. Time waits for no man and time moves fast – particularly when so much of what we need to do can be done on autopilot at any time or place. Maybe what we need to force ourselves to do is to get back to more manual means.

This is relevant at work too – perhaps even more. It’s why I often advocate the use of old-fashioned whiteboards for communication. The process of completing them is slow – but it allows you to think as you work.

What else could you do to ‘water the garden’ while you work?

Do I want to spend more time on household maintenance?

And there there is Bill Gate’s vision for the future digital home (as outlined in a speech last weekend). It’s a home in which everything is connected and linked to multiple flat screens all around the house.

Sounds fantastic? I’m not so sure, unless they get the simplicity bit right first. Which is unlikely. It more likely the typical technology approach will be followed: add features galore and think about how people will maintain them later. The end result: lots of wizzbang toys that add to the users maintenance workload.

My house needs painting, the windows need washing and I should really do the annual reinstall of Windows on the home computer. And there are 100 other jobs on my list. Not sure I want to add to it.

More evidence: Microsoft just don’t get simplicity

I hesitate to criticize Microsoft. As an ex-Microsoft user, it’s easy to be accused of simply bagging the ‘opposition’. But when it comes to simplicity, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Microsoft continue to be a wonderful example of what not to do if you want to make life easy for your customers.

Microsoft’s long-awaited new operating system, Vista, is not even available to the general public yet and they’ve already managed to make it unnecessarily complex.  Where Vista’s predecessor, Windows XP, offered two versions to choose from (‘Home’ and ‘Professional’), Vista comes in no less than four flavors: ‘Home Basic’, ‘Home Premium’, ‘Business’ and ‘Ultimate’.

I’m not even going to bother trying to interpret the differences for you (you can do that yourself here). What I don’t understand is what they are trying to do. More particularly, why they are needlessly making life more difficult for their millions of customers. Every one of those customers will now need to go through the angst of understanding the options, trying to work out which will suit them now and trying to work out whether that will still suit them in one or two years time.

Apple include the lot in just one version of their OS-X operating system. That’s simple. Why can’t Microsoft?