

Scott Adams: The "Less" Feature - cwan
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_less_feature/

======
jakevoytko
There's a delicate balance between "simple" and "too simple."

I've considered buying a cell phone that only acts as a phone. No text
messages, just some buttons and a "send" key. But some people only text. So I
need a phone that can text. And I use the phone's clock instead of a watch.
Oh, one more thing, I also use the alarm clock when I nap away from home. And
I use the address list quite a bit, because I've only memorized 4 phone
numbers.

Unfortunately for me, it would be stupid to design this phone! It reached a
tipping point where it makes more sense to use a real mobile OS. Then they can
add apps and settings and make it appeal to more people. These demands are
very inelastic. I need an alarm, and others need a tip calculator, and others
need to take notes, and some people need a calendar.

The real irony is that I would love to select my phone features à la carte
past the point of just adding and deleting apps, but that defeats the original
problem - too much choice.

~~~
chunkbot
Actually, it sounds like a classic Nokia (like the 6310i) might be perfect for
you.

Works great as a phone. Works great for text messages. Works great for a
clock, alarm, calendar, and address book.

~~~
jakevoytko
That phone has the same features as my current phone (a cheap LG), but a
simpler interface. I will try it the next time I need a phone. Thanks for the
recommendation!

~~~
StavrosK
I will second that recommendation. It was a fantastic phone. One phone like
that currently is the 6500, it's amazingly fast, cheap and only does a few
things, but it does them well.

~~~
eitally
It still is. I have a slightly more advanced, but still elderly, Nokia 6230i
and I use it any time I'm doing something that might wreck my phone but where
I do need a communication device.

~~~
StavrosK
Yes! Also a fantastic phone. Really, the 6xxx series were the best phones. I
had a 6110, 6210, 6310, 6230, and now a 6500. They were all the best phones
I've owned. I tried some of the Symbian smartphones but they were just
disappointing, they took forever to do anything.

------
ju2tin
Adams, as usual, doesn't let facts and his own hypocrisy get in the way of a
catchy blog post.

His choosing an airline ticket took a long time precisely because he WASN'T
satisfied with "less". If he really wanted less information or fewer options
and choices, he could have just used Orbitz without checking JetBlue and the
United site, Or he could have just picked a single carrier and taken whatever
flight they had available. But he wanted more -- he wanted to know about every
possible detail and every available carrier. If he wants to know who to blame
for the long time it took him to pick his ticket, he need only look in the
mirror.

Coincidentally, I used Orbitz for the first time just two days ago after an
unpleasant experience with a human travel agent who I felt was trying to push
me into options and prices I did not want. By comparison, Orbitz was much more
efficient and offered a good balance between complexity and simplicity IMHO.

~~~
watmough
Yeah, I'm kinda tired of his whiney posts.

Adams needs to spring some of that Dilbert money and hire a good PA. Hey
presto, pay the PA $150k, and life is simplified.

------
larsberg
Get a travel agent and never worry about travel again. Fixed overhead to not
worry about the problem.

I still think the most-complained-about reduction in benefits when I worked at
MSFT was when they changed over from a corporate travel agency to this hideous
book-yourself model. The agency used to also give you the options for your
personal travel, if you asked nicely.

Of course, it was just a rank and file issue. Once I was high enough in the
org to have an administrative assistant, I stopped having to book my own
travel again. Then, I understood why none of the people who travel frequently
complained when the agency was removed. After all, who cares if it takes your
developers three hours on the company clock to book their travel? owait...

~~~
ghaff
For me personally, have to disagree with you. A lot of "self-service" stuff
can be annoying but for the most part I really like having self-service
travel. I see the options and can quickly make the tradeoffs that are
important to me. Sure, you can waste hours micro-optimizing everything but you
don't have to. But that's more an issue of self-discipline than self-service
per se.

(Obviously if you an admin who knows how you like to do things, that can work
pretty well too but my general experience dealing with corporate travel
departments vs. just going to Expedia usually favors the latter.)

------
gte910h
This is why you should only be an optimizer in few, very important areas, and
should be a sufficer in the rest: You get paralyzed by this sort of choice.

Get a cheap enough flight, get a good enough understanding of the one feature
on the watch you care for (and write it down if possible) and arrange a movie
night with your friends without caring if they'd like a slightly different
variation just a little better (I mean, hell, they are always able to arrange
it if they would).

~~~
bryanh
I completely agree, and I tend to pass that over into web apps that I build.
Don't remove complexity, hide it. That's why I don't really buy whole-
heartedly into the "less-is-always-more" school of Jason Fried and company
(although you can't not respect the little empire they've built).

~~~
gte910h
There was a Joel Spolsky talk on this sorta thing on why Apple's way is better
than 37 signals, unless you're really small. Anyone have a link?

------
sigstoat
he could not only pay someone to make this problem go away, he could probably
also earn more money in the time he's not researching this than it would cost
to have someone else do it.

in fact i find it difficult to believe he doesn't already have a personal
assistant that could handle things like this.

~~~
zrntpm
Do cartoonists usually have personal assistants?

~~~
da5e
If they're as successful as Adams they might. Plus he's a restaurateur and
entrepreneur. And Tim Ferris has written extensively on hiring virtual
personal assistants.

------
Nagyman
The movie example reminded me of this:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKF1u-TOXuE>

~~~
https403
haha love it. I see myself and my wife in that characters. My questions to HN
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1620874>

------
ccc3
From a high level it's easy to look at a device or a system and say "All these
options are making this really hard. This thing should do less." But less is
just a direction, and it's only useful to go that way until you can't do
something you need to do.

The iPad isn't a success because it just does less than everything else. It
succeeds because it does what it's supposed to do incredibly well. Users have
certain expectations when they pick up an iPad and the iPad generally lets the
user do what they expect and is intuitive in the process.

In the case of travel websites it often seems that no one has taken the time
to consider what users will actually do on the site, instead just lazily
giving users every possible option. For example, if a booking site has found
me a $300 nonstop ticket it's probably not necessary to show me the 3-stop,
$1700 option. Yet they all do because nobody has taken the time to filter down
the results to the practical options (the user could create a filter, but
that's just another option to deal with). I would much rather see just the 5
flight options that I'm likely to buy instead of 30 options with 5 potential
winners buried in there somewhere.

If you're building a tool, the user will have to give some input. The key is
to give the user what they want with the minimum possible amount of
information.

------
Gormo
There has been a lot of discussion about the "paradox of choice" recently, and
I think there's something useful in the concept, as it applies to an
individual consumer attempting to find the best solution for his own
particular needs.

But the _producer_ designs their product offerings to appeal to the widest
possible market. There may not be much variation within a particular
customer's preferences, but there is a great deal of variation between the
preferences of different customers.

Eliminating choices might make things simpler for some customers, but it will
also shrink your market by alienating those customers whose preferences differ
from your new standard offering. The less choice you offer, the less mass-
market and more niche-focused your product becomes.

Overall, that means that there are two possible outcomes: (a) if there are
high barriers to entry, many customers will have to settle for a less-than-
ideal product, or (b) if there are low barriers to entry, new competitors will
emerge to appeal to the market's gaps, eventually leading to a similar level
of complexity in product choice.

The question here isn't whether a high level of product choice is a good
thing; not offering choice is only a possibility for monopolists.

The real question is one of usability: how do you offer a large number of
options in a clean and intuitive way? The solution lies in UI design, not
marketing strategy.

~~~
quanticle
>There may not be much variation within a particular customer's preferences,
but there is a great deal of variation between the preferences of different
customers.

>Eliminating choices might make things simpler for some customers but it will
also shrink your market by alienating those customers whose preferences differ
from your new standard offering.

That's true, but its not clear cut that its a loss. I mean, lets take
everyone's favorite poster child for this: Apple. I personally refuse to use
Apple products for precisely the reason you describe - they simply don't
accommodate my preferences. However, the fact that Apple products do not
accommodate the preferences of people like me has had a negligible impact on
their success.

Why is that? Its because the majority of the variation in preferences occurs
in a minority of the market. In other words, there's a small population of
people like me, who have widely varying preferences and a large population of
people whose preferences are similar enough to be served by a device with
limited features. From Apple's perspective, people like me aren't worth the
expense - its much more profitable to drop the features used by the minority
in order to hone and polish the features used by the majority.

Sure, Apple will never have me as a customer. From their perspective, that's
an acceptable trade-off, since the effort required in building features to
attract me isn't worth the opportunity cost.

------
praptak
Choosing a netbook feels very similar. You'd think that choosing a model (T410
if you're curious) gets you there. Nope. Even with the relatively small number
of configurable parameters (CPU, graphic, RAM, HD size and type) they managed
to make it a confusing mess. There are codes like NT7EUPB, NT7ETPB2C, NT7EXPB2
and no definitive source that could answer a simple(?) question: "What are the
options and how much do they cost?"

------
wheaties
Toll Brothers researched the impact of choice on their profit margins. What
they found was that given more choices, customers were not only less happy but
also cost more to please. There were greater logistical requirements to get
part A to place B, time spent selling people on home feature C, and then
additional needs for people with skill X to install said items.

------
albertzeyer
The amount of options is ok if there exists some easy way to handle them (and
to hide the options away if you don't care that much about details).

For example, if there would be a service which would take care about all those
traveling stuff (best/cheapest flight, way to/from the airport, best time) and
print all the information I really need to know, like what Scott has written
down for himself, that would be a better solution instead of just restricting
all the further options. Not sure though if we will ever see such a service.
Most attempts to do so failed because they miss too much information (mostly
about the local travel possibilities and information).

~~~
jshen
yes, more sites and more ways to view the information would help solve the
overcomplication problem ;)

------
leot
The problem is that the (current) notion of a "feature" lends itself to poor
design. If it's a "feature", then there needs to be an entry on the drop-down
menu, or an icon, or a name for the particular new thing that you can do.

What Apple seems to do right is to avoid thinking in terms of "features" and
instead (strictly) in terms of use cases: tools should ideally be sufficiently
versatile -- and simple -- that they can be applied to do many things without
each of those things having a button. Hammers, e.g., have little in the way of
"features", but are still pretty darn capable.

------
m3mb3r
The less is more mantra may not be desirable for everyone.

From one point of view (say, a seller's) the solution of "reduced number of
options" may be a good way to influence a quick and (potentially satisfying)
decision (like Dan Ariely also says here - <http://bigthink.com/ideas/20749.>)

But I as a consumer would definitely want to explore all the options before
making a decision. One good fix here is to just understand that one can't have
everything and learning to prioritize the needs.

------
Splines
This is the exact problem that Joel talks about
(<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/08/19.html>) [HN discussion:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618011>].

Like the iPhone mute button example, Scott's watch doesn't necessarily need to
be simpler, it needs to be easier to use (i.e., elegant).

------
beefman
Here's a solution to the travel problem:

Let the user input their hourly income. And the dates they want to be there,
and their actual home and destination addresses. Then search nearby airports
and departure dates based on total cost-of-trip. Time spent driving, flying,
layovers, departing early, returning late, all ring up at their hourly income
with the cost of tickets. Use a maps API for driving times to/from airports.
Wouldn't that be better?

------
lee
Totally agree. Less is a feature, and can be exploited too.

Too much choice is a bad thing. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice>

Relating to software, I often see too much choice with regards to pricing and
features.

More features do not make a better product, just as much as more pricing
schemes/packages/tiers will not lead to more sales.

------
Jkeg
The problem in this case is decision making: over-optimizing flight options
even though the gain is outweighed by the time spent doing so. Should we
really simplify everything because options might trigger someones OCD to
optimize even if those options are really useful to some people? Let there be
options but not bloat, and people can use what they need.

------
samratjp
There's an app for that - HipMunk might solve this problem (A-B flight route
planning).

------
da5e
The benefit of many options is that the user can do the simplification
himself.

------
waterhouse
The problem isn't too much choice. If the service were able to say, "Here is
an all-around good choice. You could save a maximum of 13% of the price of the
trip by shoving your schedule around, etc."--summarize the choices and
evaluate them the way a competent professional human would do it--then Adams
could choose quickly and rest easy knowing he got a _fairly_ good deal. This
is a hard thing to make a computer do--maybe it's an easy problem and Orbitz
are just idiots, but I doubt it. Perhaps they could do a moderately good job
with a moderate amount of work.

Point is, the _problem_ is that the computer finds a bunch of choices and
doesn't know which one is an all-around good default choice, what differences
are important (and thus should be presented to the user) and which ones are
irrelevant (and should be summarized or ignored). This can manifest itself as
a _symptom_ in various ways. The computer could just spit out all possible
choices, which is apparently what it does right now; then the user sees "too
many choices". The computer could pick 15 choices (the first 15 cheapest, or
alphabetically first, or the ones with indexes equal to integers from a random
number generator) and only display them; then users would probably see "a few
really bad choices, and I _know_ there are others, but the damn computer
pretends they don't exist!" Would users be happier with that? I think leaving
the choices there is the most graceful way to fail.

For the other things--the watch, the movie theaters--the problem is that
they're trying to cater to people with different desires, with the same
product.

The watch--they could make a watch that tracked running distance and displayed
the time and did nothing else, and a separate watch that let you record laps
(and displayed the average time!) but had no GPS, plus a third watch with all
features and a fourth watch that _only_ displayed the time. This would require
some diverse manufacturing equipment (dunno how much of a pain that would be;
perhaps not much), 4x the shelf space at stores that sell watches (this would
definitely be a pain), 4x as many entries in watch catalogs, and so on. Maybe
this would be worth it, if enough people would be willing to "pay 50% more"
for it. But, of course, this means a bunch more choices as well, just at a
different time.

They could also just make one kind of watch and throw all their other
customers out the window. This is like the "solution" of throwing out all but
15 arbitrary choices on Orbitz. I doubt if Adams would be pleased if they
chose to make only the "it records laps, but no GPS and no tracking running
distance" model. Maybe they could run a service: "You tell us what features
you want on your watch, and we'll send you a watch that has only those
features (and a correspondingly easy interface to them)." Dunno, has anyone
tried that? Anyway, the problem is how to provide good products (where
simplicity of use is a good feature) that are useful to many people who want
different features on the product, when the product's nature (having only a
few buttons) makes it hard to provide simplicity along with all the other
features.

"Too many choices" is the symptom. The problem is something else, and
providing too many choices is what someone thought was the best way to punt on
that problem. If you ask for fewer choices, either you're asking for some
nontrivial work--to solve the underlying problem in a way no one's thought of
before--or you're asking for a different way to punt, likely a worse way.

------
fforw
oh teh irony of an article about "less" a being wall of text / tldr.

