“Keep it simple, stupid!” I don’t who first uttered that phrase, but I like it. And yesterday, I was the “stupid” one. I suggested a change to our app, Wes pushed back. He told me he thought it would create more noise. And you know what? He was absolutely right. He was our guardian of simplicity, and that’s an ever more critical role to play in any business.
Our scenario got me to thinking about how hard it is to keep things simple. Whether it’s your web site, our your app, or your menu, you have to make tough decisions to keep it simple. It’s easy to give somebody 50 options. Or 50 links to click on. Not so easy to narrow those options down to 10 by making the decision to cut out 40 of them. Not simple to make the choices that result in simplicity.
But if you are bold enough to make those decisions, bold enough not to worry that you’ll leave somebody out, that you’ll lose somebody because you don’t have the option they want, you’ll completely win over the people who are tired of too many choices. Tired of so many decisions all day, every day. The people who are craving simplicity because their lives are so busy and full of noise and, yes, too many choices. So for every one customer you lose, you’ll gain 10 who are so thankful that you’ve made their life a little easier that not only will they be your customer, they’ll be passionate fans.
We get lots of emails and videos from people telling us how much they love Schedulefly. It’s not because our app has so much stuff in it. It’s because we work hard to keep it simple for them.
It’s always fun to receive emails with comments about our posts. If you’d like to share yours, I’m at wbrawley [at] schedulefly [dot] com.
KISS,
Wil
P.S. You may not be able to hear me as well as in my other video posts. The walls at my office are paper-thin, and the lady next door can hear everything I say. She’s normally on the phone, but today she is just typing (I can hear her keystrokes), and I guess it made me feel like I need to talk softer than normal. I bet she thinks I’m weird. I have a tripod sitting in the middle of my office with a Flip cam on it, facing a white board. It bet it looks shady. Anyway, sorry if you can’t hear me well in this vid.
P.S.S. I just noticed that I’m partially off screen during some of the vid. It’s too long to re-record it. Close your eyes if it’s annoying, because I think the message is still worth listening to.