Two recent Fast Company posts by contributor Drake Baer, reminded me of the criticality of simplicity. Baer built his thoughts on The Simplicity Thesis , an article written about a year ago by Aaron Levie, the CEO and co-founder of Box). His first blog was about the importance of keeping products simple. Baer writes,
Since the mass market is so massive, your product needs to be massively simple. Not just the number of elements in a page or the time required to use it, but how the user cognitively experiences it.
And then he applied this concept to emails,
Since people are both busy and lazy, they’re “more likely to respond to information requests–whether important or trivial–if they’re easy to address,” as Quartz recently reported. And even if a message is important, if it’s too complex, it won’t get a response.
Frankly, it’s not that everyone is lazy, but that we don’t have the brain cycles to devote to something too complex. All of this is based on some very interesting research on cognitive overhead, or how much brain-work is necessary to understand what to do with what is presented to us. The more cognitive overhead, the more complexity, the less likely it is to happen.
How can you simplify your work processes? your email? your customer’s experience?
That’s a WRAP! Have a nice weekend.
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