After Jobs created iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. with concise style, all the world declares they are building products easy to understand, easy to use. But why? How? And do you have the courage?
Let's start with why. Firstly, product is only a tool to help the people to complete their works, to satisfy their requirements. People should not focus on the tool but the work/requirement itself. So, your product need to be simple enough to understand, to use. Secondly, there are too many products, people can easily find an alternation. If your product is beyond their depth, you will lose them.
Then, how? I will give four suggestions. First of all, you need to be very clear what kinds of groups are your target customers, and what kind of product you want to provide. You must have a rule, a boundary, remove the features outside the boundary. Secondly, categorize the features, this is the way people understand the world, it will help them to remember and use your product. The third is hide some advanced functions or the functions are necessary but not to be adopted frequently, for instant, many products have a "give us feedback" button, but it only shows when you meet some problems, or it is hidden in very deep place. Finally, we move some functions to a place easy to use, for example, if your device is hard to interact with, your can think to build mobile App to communicate with your device and control it through the App.
Courage? Yes, courage, don't surprise. Brief is not simple. Which functions you should remove, which functions need to hidden, how to categorize them, all these need wisdom and nerve, you need to take responsibility to make the decision. And a PM who are not qualified will put all functions in a product, and her/is excuse is the customer will make the choice. Actually, it only annoys the customers. So, you need courage, and the courage is from your experience and data analyzation.
