In recent years, the rise of the simplicity movement has emerged as a major new trend in product design. Take a look at your mobile phone. How many features does it have? How many of those functions do you use on a daily basis? How many have you never used — although of course you’ve paid for them as an integrated part of your chosen mobile phone?

A few weeks ago, I lost my mobile phone and had to replace it with a new one. Examining the various models on the market, I made the following observations: Most of the phones with a nicer design carry lots of features that I don’t use — and come at a steep price. However, one producer has gone against the conventional wisdom for product line designs. With models such as the sleek Razr or the playful Pebl, Motorola designed beautiful masterpieces that concentrate on elementary product functions and hence can be offered at very reasonable prices. For me, the price-value propositions of these mobile phones made for an easy purchasing decision.

Albert Einstein once said: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Most consumer technology products have been designed by the technologically sophisticated for the comparatively small number of advanced techno geeks — and not for the masses of average consumers. While many early adopters get a thrill in trying their hand with the special functions and on fighting their way through big user manuals of over a hundred pages, the feature-richness of most tech products becomes problematic for the majority of users. And here we come to the factors that explain the huge success of products like Apple’s iPod or of the Motorola Razr. Of course, the gorgeous designs and the very intuitive user interfaces play major roles here. But also take note of the courage of the designers to vote for simplicity by eliminating unnecessary features compared to previously existing products in the same category. So in product design and also in designing other areas of business, less is often more. But at the same time, “it is simplicity that is difficult to make,” as the dramatist Bertolt Brecht noted.

There is another interesting aspect about designing simpler products. The more complex and feature-rich a product, the more prone the product is to failure. The prominent U.S. computer scientist Alan Perlis, a pioneer in programming languages, reminded software programmers that “Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it,” and he also noted: “Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.” Some luxury car companies had to go through the lesson that initially, some advanced technologies such as automatic braking systems did not work because of software problems and had to be simplified to eliminate the bugs. So it seems that Leonardo da Vinci is right that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Do you want to join the rapidly increasing simplicity movement with your business? Here are some great questions that you can ask to simplify your business processes or to gain true insights into the essence of your economic offering — be it a product, a service, a customer solution, or a customer experience:

• How can we make this process simpler and remove complexity? How else? How else? Henry Ford understood that he needed to reduce the complexity of his then revolutionary production process for his famous Ford Model T car, the assembly line that allowed for mass production of cars. So he systematically eliminated complexity — even in unusual areas: “People can have the Model T in any color — so long as it’s black.”

• From all the things we do here, what are the vital things that really add value to our clients?

• What is the essence of our value proposition with this particular product (service, solution, experience)? For example, the essential value that an airline proposes to its customers is ‘fly safely from point A to B.’ Budget airlines focus their business model on this essential core value proposition and have eliminated all other features that were taken for granted by the established players in the airline industry.

• What are the few features of our economic offering that are the most appreciated by our customers?

• What features of our economic offering can we take away to add more value? Here consider the advice of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.”

• “Nature uses as little as possible of anything,” observed the great scientist Johannes Kepler. So how can we learn from nature and achieve the same effect (or output) while using less input?

By the way, notice that the call for simplicity goes hand in hand with H.M. the King of Thailand’s idea of a sufficiency economy. Less is often more, and simplicity needs to be a core aim of a creative business leader. As the jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus said: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2007. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 20 July 2007.