Simple to Install and Use

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Simple to install, and simple to use.

One way to think about it is the out-of-the-box experience. I use that as a metaphor: it does not necessarily mean there is a box, but if there is, it means the packaging is easy to open, easy to take out, easy to assemble. For software, out-of-the-box means: is it super easy to install? Do I even have to think about it? Is the onboarding really easy? And it must be simple to use, not just simple to get going. Complexity is almost always bad in an onboarding process of any sort.

Advantage = innovation × simplicity. A true competitive advantage is a combination of innovation and simplicity. Simple is the opposite of complex, and if simple is an advantage, then complexity is a disadvantage. So your advantage is your innovation multiplied by your simplicity. Any innovation, if it is simple enough, has the potential to be adopted; the more complex it is, the more likely it runs into all the integration and adoption issues. You want to innovate, but not to the point where it is so complex nobody will use it, because then you get tripped up even after you have successfully sold it. Less is almost always more.

The classic example is the remote control. Microsoft’s entertainment-center remote had dozens and dozens of buttons; Apple came along with three buttons that did everything that one did, and guess which was more successful. It is also why software as a service, like Google Docs, has pulled people back from complexity. Have you used Word recently? The number of menus and features is insane. People have pulled back and are looking for products that solve basic problems super easily. (One caveat raised by the audience: with those two remotes, one is arguably more “superior” and the other more “simple”; buttons versus a touch surface is a subjective design choice. Apple has historically been the leader in design, a tiny device whose battery lasts a year. Consumer devices in particular are very taste-driven. But the trend toward instant gratification and economy of motion, one click, next-day delivery, the dopamine hit of the package showing up, is real and probably permanent.)

Knowledge Management to Evernote. Knowledge Management was supposed to be a multi-billion-dollar market; companies like Lotus Notes got built on it. It is nowhere today because it was horribly complex to put in place. Along comes Evernote, built for note-taking, incredibly simple. It is probably the best knowledge-management tool I have ever used, because I can capture notes, take pictures, even take recordings, and share with anyone anywhere, even people who do not use Evernote. Some of that infrastructure did not exist when Knowledge Management was created, but if you had to go pitch the old thing, it was a lot of work. Would you not rather just take out a tablet and capture it that simply?

Simplify to your core. Give up everything other than the core capability of value as the starting point. Reduce it to the absolute essence of what you do uniquely well for somebody, and then either leave everything else out of the box, or figure out how to partner with others for it. Keep it simple: minimum viable segment, solve one or two, maybe three critical problems for the group you have identified, and nail it.

Out-of-box experience (UBE) and ease of use. I have used the expression UBE for years: out-of-box experience, that amazing moment when you open the wrapping and everything feels great and you are dying to use the product. Give your customers that delightful experience in software and services, not just packaging. Why is it a big deal? It is the single biggest reason Siebel struggled: their products were torture to get up and running, which made them an easy target for Salesforce, which said, “We’ll give you a delightful experience, you don’t have to install anything, you can start using it right away, it costs very little, and you can customize it.” A whole company disappeared, in my opinion, because of this, and a new Goliath emerged. Templates are part of this too: Apple gave you templates right out of the box to make beautiful photo albums, and Drupal Gardens gave people templates to get a site live.

Progressive disclosure. If you have a lot of functionality to disclose, do it progressively. Do not confront somebody with everything so they fall off a cliff with a huge learning curve. Take them step by step. Drupal is so broad (tens of thousands of modules) that we created Drupal Gardens to get you live on the web in 15 minutes, a very different experience than trying to assemble everything from drupal.org. The moment people got going, they would ask for blogging, or a community; we let them turn on modules as they needed them, not all 10,000 out of the box, which would have been overwhelming. And if our bundled modules were still not enough, they could export the whole thing and use any of the 10,000 modules to build their own site, so there was no lock-in. It created tens of thousands of sites within months of launch.

Breakout: how could you make your product super simple to install? A couple of examples from the room. The Pitch App: “a Tinder for entrepreneurs and investors, where you upload a 45-second video pitching your idea, and an investor swipes left or right and connects based on geolocation and category.” Foodie: “an app that integrates restaurant processes; with a QR code on the table, customers browse the menu, edit dishes, place the order, and pay whenever they want. To make installation simple, we removed the install entirely: rather than a full app, we started with a web-based app, so the customer does not download anything, they just scan the QR code and order. We also thought about frictionless access, putting the Wi-Fi code under the QR code, and integrating directly with the restaurant’s existing POS/API so the kitchen automatically gets the orders on screen and does not manage two systems.” Exactly the type of thinking we want at this stage.

The hardware angle (Q&A). For a hardware MVP (say, wireless chargers embedded in furniture), the complexity of a prototype (breadboards, wires everywhere, bigger than it will be at scale) is different from the complexity of the problem you are solving. You could have a Rube-Goldberg prototype that came out of the lab; what you are really testing is: if I put a piece of cloth over it and rest my phone on it, does it instantly start charging? That simplicity of the use case is what matters early. If you told me the first device would charge in an armchair, on a refrigerator, and connect Apple Watches and AirPods, I would say start with just the armchair: find a furniture maker (someone on Etsy, someone doing a group-financed piece, or an adhesive stick-on pad with a four-year battery) to embed it, get that one question answered before adding features. Tell the VCs the giant vision (“it’ll be in every chair, every public space, every airline seat”), but if you cannot get a single furniture manufacturer to embed the thing, it is not going to work, so prove that first.