Successful digital products simplify the complex
The hallmark of success for Wealthsimple? When Millennials started getting their parents to use it, wiping out the traditional financial advisor intermediary, tax preparation experts and even cryptocurrency complexities. Calendaring apps and tools are striving to do this. Unfortunately, productivity apps aren’t. Notion was supposed to be an app that simplified running a startup. It got bogged down in a constant cycle of releasing new features. Which other productivity apps have followed. Our lives are becoming increasingly complex as the physical and digital worlds come together. The new challenge for digital products? Simplification.
In Canada, Loblaws launched its Optimum points program in 2018, along with app to manage one’s points earned through purchases. It is simple, elegant and one knows just what monetary value is there and using it to apply to a purchase is simple. AirMiles on the other hand is complicated and takes time to understand how to add rewards, makes claims and understand the value of points. Most food ordering apps, from Skip the Dishes to Uber Eats are simple to use.
These successful apps understand two critical things; 1) what business they are in and 2)the customer experience journey across different devices. Everything their products do is designed with these two key elements in mind. They succeed because they stay focused and understand their role is not to attract customers through features, but through solving a particular problem and solving it well. Startups would do well to keep this in mind.
Some software and digital products do need to deal with a complex set of behaviours, but they focus on features, using that as their pitch to solve a problem and that just ends up in complicated products. Productivity apps are probably the guiltiest for this. Evernote went so far down this path it became a very complicated product, until they went back to the drawing board, got rid of the superfluous and returned to their roots, being a note taking and digital archive tool. Interestingly, they added tasks and calendar access, but managed to stay simple. A whole sub-industry has evolved around coaches who teach people how to use these apps and create productivity systems. That is an indicator of how productivity apps have created more complexity, not less. Which means less productivity.
Pocket is a sort of bookmarking tool, digital life storage tool as well, but mainly for websites, yet they’ve managed to keep the product simple. As has Pinterest. Clean, focused on what their customer wants. Consumers are lazy, especially when it comes to cognitive activities. The more they have to think, the less likely they are to engage, especially with information products.
The online gambling and eSports and betting markets are also one of the worst offenders for keeping complicated things complicated and missing out on huge revenue opportunities when it comes to digital products. They design complicated mobile apps and websites, requiring a huge amount of cognitive resources from customers. If they can reduce this heavy cognitive lifting, they could really be making money. They’ve failed to really understand the customer experience. I’ve yet to find any online gambling, eSports or sports bettor that has made a good digital product.
So the big opportunity is with simplifying big, traditionally complex, problems. Financial management, home and auto insurance (no ones done that yet), stock trading app Robinhood (Wealthsimple does it too), university course selections, internal corporate communications (i.e. Slack, which is a mess.) One of my favourite examples of a brand that does the exact opposite of making good, clean, simplified software is Salesforce. Whenever they acquire a digital product, they make it incredibly more complicated. If you’re looking for the leader in making incredibly complicated software products, it isn’t Microsoft, it’s Salesforce…but that’s also how they actually make money. Not on the products, but on licenses and a massive support market through professional services. It’s a business model, not in favour of the customer, but good for Salesforce. It’s the same for SAP, Oracle and other ERP products. Their model is keeping things complicated. To some degree it is justified. Supply chain management and logistics will need a massive investment in Artificial Intelligence tools to be able to reach true simplification in their digital products. But that’s the enterprise market.
Simplifying the complex is incredibly easy as an idea, but very hard to execute. It requires a very deep understanding of the customer, excellent UX/UI design, engineers on the backend to deal with managing the complexity, and excellent DevOps skills to make it happen and investing in up front research. Design is critical. And marketers who know how to create the most effective messaging, who understand behaviours at a deep level. It is no longer a cheap game as the stakes are incredibly high. But if you can orchestrate the team the right way and focus on simplification and trying not to be everything to everybody, you may win.
