Marketing Profs

Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. What is simple to the creator is rarely so simple to the customer.

I recently bought a Philips CD burner. Its software was difficult to install. What I wanted to do was copy music I had bought from Apple iTunes. When I finally managed to complete the installation, it wouldn't let me do that. Thus, I wasted about 30 minutes installing and uninstalling the software.

I decided to try iTunes support. There were simple instructions about how to copy songs onto a CD. I followed them. I was able to simply copy songs using the Apple software and the Philips CD burner.

Philips currently has a marketing campaign called "sense and simplicity." I checked it out on its site. The first sentence reads, "The digital revolution is supposed to have made our lives easier, but studies have shown that's not the case."

How true.

In the middle of the page that this text comes from is a large animation that is constantly in motion, making it very difficult to read the text. It is ironic that text which is championing simplicity should be cluttered by a totally unnecessary and highly distracting animation. Whoever designed this page certainly doesn't understand simplicity very well.

Apple understands simplicity. Its products live simplicity. Practically every Apple product I have ever owned has been a pleasure to use. iTunes and iPod are simple, elegant and intuitive.

I keep noticing advertising campaigns now by organizations that are telling us how simple their products and services are. I don't believe them, because my experience is that while many talk simplicity, very few practice it.

I'm sure that within Philips there is a genuine belief that it is important to make products as simple as possible to use. However, there is a big difference between marketing your products as simple to use and making them genuinely simple.

Simplicity is hard. It's expensive to do well. "Our experience is that for every mouse click we take out of the user experience, 20 things have to happen in our software behind the scenes," states Brad Treat, Chief Executive of SightSpeed.