Keeping It Simple

Keeping it simple is a principle that is timeless and applies across all industries, primarily because customers never ask for a complex solution.

So why is this so hard? Great product teams are always clear on who their customers are and what problem they are trying to solve, but often after requirements are finalized and designs underway, teams can find themselves going adrift. In my experience, many companies attribute this lack of focus to two main reasons:

The results are predictably schedule delays, scope creep or worse — a suboptimal solution that leaves customers confused and frustrated.

Here are a couple of example projects that I worked on where it was all about keeping it simple. The first is an investment portfolio review solution for customers to evaluate and adjust their investment strategy. While extremely complex from an internal company process and compliance framework, the solution needed to be easy to use and help customers feel good while building their confidence to make decisions about an investment strategy that was best for them. The second is an education resource fund solution with the primary focus to raise money and issue grants to classrooms across school districts. This seemed simple enough, but required focus on how to keep the solution simple from a user experience as well as easy for the company to maintain, while finding a way to re-purpose over 25 pages of content that resided on the old site.

So regardless of industry or size of project, next time you are designing a customer solution, remember to ask yourself am I keeping it simple?

Lisa Ryan Weil is a Principal Consultant @ Weil Consulting, LLC. For more information about business solutions she provides, visit her website at www.weilconsultingllc.com