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Simplexity - The New and Efficient Brand of Cleverness
'Peter Wippermann
Peter Wippermann
New technologies and data services are coming onto the scene to simplify our lives. They open up for us an infinitely larger spectrum of information and possibilities. The only problem is, we understand these technologies less and less and are more and more dependent on them in our daily lives. What we need is a fast and easy way to cope with the growing complexity of our world. The flood of information, features and possibilities only bewilders us. We long for simplicity and satisfaction. Simplexity therefore stands for a balance between the growing complexity of daily life and our own personal satisfaction. In order to attain this state, we have to stop always striving to make optimal decisions. In the future, it will be more important to make judgments that are just good enough. Today’s consumer demands maximum choice with a minimal loss of orientation.
Growing complexity and an increasing need for simplicity
Atomization of attention span
Our world today is plastered over with advertisements. It's hard to find a single TV show that's not sponsored by a brand, or a website without a banner. Posters are starting to communicate with passersby via Bluetooth, and buildings like the SAP headquarters in Berlin have facades whose complete surface forms a screen for media presentations. Advertising pressure is rising steadily, with the result that the intended “buzz” is instead heard as diffuse background noise made up of competing offers. The quantity of advertising messages sent every week by email has gone up in the past 15 months from an average of 800 million in December 2004 to 1.2 billion in March 2006. Some 60 percent of all emails can be classified as Spam (Technology Review, March 2006). Every new advertisement or media offering only serves to thicken the information smog. Media and brands exert more and more energy courting the increasingly rare commodity of consumer attention. At the same time, our attention spans are growing frayed in the face of ever-tighter time budgets.
As a consequence, our visual habits are becoming more superficial as we strive to absorb the most important information as quickly as possible. A study of the perceptual habits of Google users showed that all users take the time to examine the first three hits in a Google search. But from the sixth hit on, half of the test subjects broke off their investigation. The attention span is limited to a few top listings. Websites unable to reach these top positions disappear in the anonymous crowd. This reflects the drama of today’s progress: despite all that's out there, we are only able to attend to and remember a limited amount of information.
Featuritis and isolated solutions generate frustration
Gadgets are evolving more and more into all-purpose multimedia wonders, as they grow ever smaller and more complex to operate. For example, the borderline between mobile phone, digital camera and MP3 player is becoming increasingly blurred. New functions are constantly being integrated into these devices. According to Stern Markenprofile, 73 percent of those surveyed today agree that most devices have more functions than the user really needs. This points up a key dilemma. In the store, the number of features helps to boost sales. Touting a product’s many possibilities suggests added value and a good offer, as a recent study by Harvard Business Week concluded. But once a new device finds its way back home, its plethora of features only makes for user frustration; the extra functions inflate the user manual to unreadable proportions and are incomprehensible, complicated to use or even fully unnecessary. After all, the main thing is that the device should work when carrying out its main purpose.
User frustration can also be found on the content side. One quarter of all order transactions begun on the Internet are broken off again by users unable to navigate their way through the online shop. The superabundance of categories and available options confuses, frustrates and ultimately prevents us from taking action. The same thing goes for digital rights management. The jungle of different standards and limitations robs the customer of any joy he might have using the products. This situation makes it clear that we are over-challenged rationally and under-challenged emotionally. We long for simplicity so that we can enjoy ourselves once again and feel satisfied.
Information flood causes confusion
Parallel to advertising pressure, innovation pressure is also spiraling. Technology is forging ahead faster and faster and leaving more and more people behind in its wake, with a question mark over their heads. Whether it’s electronic glitches in the car or yet another unexplained PC crash—the problem remains a mystery, leaving us unable to solve it by ourselves. At the same time, it costs us more and more energy to adapt to new computer programs and to new device generations coming out in ever-shorter cycles.
The focus in the technology-drive industries lies squarely on whatever is technically possible, instead of how the new technologies will be accepted by the consumer, or how they can be conveyed in a way the layperson is able to understand. But the majority of people see themselves as users who want to—and must—be able to operate these technologies without assistance. They need interfaces that give them quick, intuitive access to the growing complexity of their world. This is where Simplexity comes in.
The ability to make rapid and smart decisions
We have more freedom today than ever and, with it, more personal responsibility. We are faced with more decisions. But we are increasingly lacking in security, reliability, meaning, orientation and time. As a result, we constantly have too much to cope with and feel stressed-out. This blocks and hinders our decision-making capability. But not choosing is always the worst choice. Information annihilation is becoming a critical skill. The new survival kit “Simplexity” consists of trust, aesthetics and rules of thumb. They help us to consolidate the complexity of the available information and thus accelerate the decision-making process. Gradually, a new pragmatism is starting to prevail: decide more swiftly in order to live more intensively.
Trust compensates for confusion
We compensate for insecurity, incomplete information and time pressure with trust. But trust changes. Trust in institutions is practically no longer existent, and media, brands and commerce are also having a hard time lately fighting dwindling consumer trust. For example, more than half of the professional sales staff in Germany don’t know the differences between the four different seals of approval for HDTV television sets.
Our reaction to dishonest advertisers and clueless salespeople is to believe much more strongly in what we are familiar with, what we have experienced ourselves, or what is recommended to us directly by friends. Therefore, testing products in real life is becoming more and more crucial. But since in the face of constant change we have fewer and fewer relevant experiences to go on, it's no wonder that we rely so much today on the experiences of friends and acquaintances. Models of success such as OpenBC, MySpace, or word of mouth from the neighborhood show that it’s the weak ties, in other words the contacts of our contacts, that we find especially useful.
Rules of thumb enable us to act
Rules of thumb are an expression of our everyday logic. The accumulated daily experiences of those in our private circle are condensed into general rules that are constantly adapted to our needs. The American military thus works with the so-called “70 percent solution”: make a decision when you have evaluated 70 percent of the available information to 70 percent satisfaction and when you are 70 percent convinced that your decision is the right one. The results are of course not exactly optimal. But they enable people to make individual and rapid decisions that are good enough.
Aesthetics lend meaning
Similar to trust, aesthetics are also a central filter of our actions. Familiar forms, colors and surfaces are emotional hooks. Aesthetics promises continuity in a world that is changing faster and faster. This continuity becomes even more important in a society in which young people are becoming the minority and that is at the same time driven by innovation. We know from our media socialization that the willingness and ability to take for granted the use of new, interactive media declines in proportion to advancing age, just like visual acuity, motor skills and the powers of comprehension. Aesthetically appealing design builds a bridge between growing technological complexity and a society that doesn’t want to get old. It gives people the feeling: “You can stay just like you were.” The example of the iPod makes this abundantly evident. A simple Braun design from the 1960s today makes this device a lifestyle icon. These days, design is a central purchasing criterion, second only to price. It works like an interface since it makes a product quick and easy to use and provides clear orientation. This metaphor could also be applied to the way we live our lives. Our interface with life is like a user interface that hides from us the complexity of the hardware, software and network technologies behind it. We trust in the icons to guide us and have no interest in trying to understand the programming codes that make it all happen. Marketing could learn something from this comparison. After all, the future will be more about information destruction than informational variety. The way the interface to the market offerings is designed is critical to their success.
Easy decision-making is what counts
For developers and marketers, simplexity means taking seriously consumers’ growing need for simplicity and usability. Offers must be designed to provide consumers with much more support in reaching a decision than used to be the case. There are three basic strategies for reacting to this need: Servolution, Try(Ad)vertising and Sense Branding.
Servolution: service with a smile
Today, if you work for a big company and have a computer problem, you just call the HelpDesk. IT Support logs into your computer, and you can sit back and watch as they take over control and solve the problem in real time. This way, users can see for themselves how to solve the problem. These kinds of personal services that solve problems on-demand, quickly and easily, will in future develop more strongly in the private sector as well. And consumers and users will be increasingly willing to pay for this kind of service.
On the other hand, automated services will become even more significant. We are leaving more and more digital traces and feedback behind, which have yet to really be analyzed or exploited. Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired, presumes that the future of the 21st-century economy is already slumbering today in the world’s databases. The information there will make it possible to put together customized, automated offers. Amazon has long since spearheaded this development with its collaborative filtering. This helps users to conveniently orient themselves according to the behavior and preferences of others.
Try(Ad)vertising: try and buy
Personal services are relatively expensive. To reduce HelpDesk costs, it is worthwhile investing in helping users to help themselves. This can be done by creating positive involvement and experiences with products and applications. This form of advertising by testing is ultimately aimed at boosting user satisfaction. Pioneer here is the Apple store in London. In addition to selling, the store serves primarily to explain to users the possibilities offered by the computers and the various Apple software applications. To this end, both demos and free intro courses are offered. Another example of successful Tryvertising is Adobe Live. This is a kind of roadshow at which, in the course of two days, visionaries present and explain the functions of the various Adobe products. They should know how to operate the hardware and software and how to communicate their positive experiences to others.
Sense branding: sense and sensibility
The aesthetic answer to the growing complexity of our world is to create offers with emotional appeal that stand out from the crowd. Conveying a sense of simplicity in the face of high-tech complexity is the wave of the future. After all, an aging society with aesthetic preferences based on their younger years will continue to go for retro trends. However, no matter how old-fashioned, the interface must still be designed for quick and easy handling. This involves in particular intuitive navigation and optimized operability. Whole new jobs have been created in this field in the past few years, from Information Architect to Search Engine Optimizer. The central goal is to increase logical consistency, comprehensibility and usability. Office supplies dealer Staples, for example, was able to reduce the break-off quota in its online shop by 73 percent merely by cleaning things up a bit, boosting sales to the tune of 6 million USD per month.
Simplexity creates satisfaction
Simplexity is the key answer to the growing desire for satisfaction, and is at the same time the major challenge of the coming years. The fundamental innovation represented by the network economy is increasingly turning consumers into producers, driving individualization forward with the effect of making things even more complex. Decisions are becoming a duty. The new motto is: “Simplexify my life!”
Translated from German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
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