KISSed in the Face

Most designs and strategies start off as simple and elegant.  

But then the KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly) qualities of the plan get lost during implementation.  

As Mike Tyson put it, "Everyone has a plan—until they get punched in the mouth."  

The challenge is maintaining Strategic Simplicity®.

Focus on External AND Internal Systems for E-Commerce Success

Many E-commerce companies focus attention on the design of the customer experience, and the user interfaces that customers use. But the best ones also focus on the employee experience and the design of user interfaces that their employees use when servicing customers.

This is important because I have seen many incidents where the customer experience was affected because employees trying to provide customer support where hamstrung by poorly designed and functioning internal systems.

My May Chicago Business Journal column: What the Chicago Cubs can teach tech companies about user design

https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2018/06/11/what-the-chicago-cubs-can-teach-tech-companies.html

Zen, Simplicity, and Design

It doesn't matter what you want to design: software, hardware, furniture, or a business process.


You can benefit from a philosophy of zen and simplicity:


1. To achieve enlightenment and relief from suffering, Zen teaches detachment.  In design, we can apply detachment to escape the specifics of a situation, and design a better, more universal solutions that can be re-used.  Abstract. Simplify. Generalize.


2.  Zen teaches the concept of the Beginner's Mind—see things with fresh eyes.  In design, this means to start from 0, remove as many preconceptions as you can.


3. Zen value of emptiness.   Self-imposed restrictions and constraints increase elegance and economy.  Keep trying to make your design smaller, more minimal, with less parts—until you can't take anything away.

My Toothpaste Tube Does Wi-Fi!

Imagine that your company, wanting to hop onto the IoT bandwagon, creates a tube of toothpaste that does wi-fi!

Unfortunately, the wi-fi connection fails 30% of the time.


Even worse, you designed the tube so that the cap won't come off unless the wi-fi is connected!


OOPS!


This is NOT an example of Strategic Simplicity®.  

You've not only added a lot of complexity and risk, for a marginal upside (who needs their toothpaste tube to upload information?) but, even worse, the most important function of your product is at the mercy of a much less important one. 

This is obviously an exaggerated case yet, after almost 30 years of working in business, management, and technology, I've seen countless examples where product and marketing teams are their own worse enemies—adding features and functionality which reduce the effectiveness and utility of otherwise very powerful business solutions.