Simplicity’ and ‘selection’ are often at odds with each other. If someone told you ‘choice is a luxury that makes things easier for customers’ intuitively we would agree, wouldn’t we?
Many brands have focused for a long time on increasing the features of their products, as though by increasing the number of functions a product could perform, they would somehow stack the weight in favour of customers choosing their products.
The push to provide more and more choice for customers is often encouraged by three factors: ‘internal influencers’ within the company, ‘external competitors’ vying for the same market space, and supposedly by ‘perceived customer need’. Sometimes the ‘pull’ of the first two factors is so great they act as a type of ‘peer pressure’ on decisions, and executives forget to ask if additional choice would really make things easier for customers.
Much has been written on this paradox of choice. Articles from The Economist and The New York Times are just two examples.
So the next time we’re asked to add yet another feature to an existing product, perhaps instead we should ask, is there a way to make this product (or range of products) simpler?
