Simplicity Creates User Satisfaction

An article in the latest Harvard Business Review titled Defeating Feature Fatigue reminds me of a post at Creating Passionate Users on breakthrough ideas. The Harvard article goes into analytical detail on how companies continue to add features to their products but in the process severely hurt the usability of their products. Customers may be more motivated to buy the product that offers the most features, but will be less happy with the product once they realize how unusable the product is. Post-sale satisfaction is maximized with the simplest features that provides the best usability (sound familiar, IDEO?) So, there must be a happy medium that optimally trades off sellability with post-sale user satisfaction. The figure to the right demonstrates the HBR authors' theoretical analysis of this trade-off, indicating that the happy medium is--surprise, surprise--not too many features, not too few. Sounds like the Goldilocks Strategy: the number of features is just right.

Last year, the Creating Passionate Users blog posted a very similar looking curve, which is shown here on the left. Look familiar? The point that CPU made was the same as the HBR authors. Usability has a big impact on user satisfaction, and often simplicity provides the best solution for product design. Having the most features might get customers to buy the product when they are considering different items at a store, but users prefer simplicity and ease-of-use after they actually own a product and therefore simplicity provides the most long-term user value. Users don't want complexity and don't want to have to read the manual whenever they want to use one of the product's features. Great scoop on HBR, CPU!

Comments

[Gary Bourgeault]

Your absolutely right Brent. I have been telling people that I consult with for years that this is the key to success, but they keep thinking that cool stuff is what is going to make a product successful.
Yet, as you mention, simplicity is the key. I finally quit buying tons of products when I would look at my bookshelf and see about a two-inch thick book for each product I bought. I realized that I was buying something that I would use one or two features, and disregard the rest. Now I will only buy simplicity!

[bwedwards]

Hi, Gary. Thanks for your thoughts. You're right, conveying the need for intuitive products is difficult to convey.

The need for simplicity is particularly difficult to see when you are working at a company to improve an existing product. The obvious solution is to add more features to existing products, something everyone in an product-development organization can understand, but this does not necessarily improve the product for the consumer. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a software engineer explain that their UI is simple because "the user only needs to click here then pull down this menu item and press alt-A to activate the needed feature." Simple :)

[aion kinah]

Hi, Gary. Thanks for your thoughts. You're right, conveying the need for intuitive products is difficult to convey.

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