Few months ago, the image below was floating around the web for a while, perhaps because so many people empathized with it.
It seems like now days, everyone agrees simplicity is important, but one should ask, by how much? I recently finished reading “Yes!” and one of the chapters, “When does offering people more make them want less?,” includes an interesting research on simplicity vs complicated choices.
Iyengar and fellow social scientist Mark Lepper also examined whether the damaging effect of offering too much occurred in other domains, such as food products. They set up a display at an upscale supermarket in which passersby could sample a variety of jams that were all made by a single manufacturer. Throughout the course of the study, the researchers varied the number of flavors of the jam offered, so that either six or twenty-four flavors were featured at the display at any given time. The results demonstrated a clear and astonishing difference between the two conditions: Only 3 percent of those who approaced the extensive-choice display actually purchased any jam. Contrast that with the 30 percent who bought jam when they approached the limited-choice display. (p.31)
We tend to think offering more options and more product lines will actually drive more sales and volume, but looking at the research like this, one has to wonder if this conventional thinking is indeed true. It maybe is worthwhile to keep in mind that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple as iCEO, one of the first things he did was to trim down the tens of product lines to just four: two notebooks and two desktops. This decision lead to a hefty increase in revenue. Now days, they have iPods and iPhone, but considering their revenue and size, it’s still relatively easy to remember all of their products.
It’s interesting that iPhone alone, in terms of revenue, beat few other major players like LG which sells hundreds of product lines. Simplicity can be beneficial not only to a single user’s experience, but to overall numbers for your company.
Tags: business, design, simplicity
