Why Simplicity Is So Complex

Entrepreneurs should make things easy, for themselves and their customers. So why don’t we?

- By Greg Mckeown

When a team of Apple’s best product designers presented to Steve Jobs what became the iDVD—a now-defunct computer application that allowed users to burn video files onto a DVD— they expected their boss to be wowed. The design was beautiful and clean. The app performed numerous functions, even though the team had dramatically streamlined the original version, which had a thousand-page user manual.

But Jobs had something else in mind. He walked to the whiteboard and drew a rectangle. Then he said, “Here’s the new application. It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.”

Simplicity is an art form. Entrepreneurs strive to create products that are simple to use, services that are simple to access, websites and apps that are simple to navigate, and customer experiences that are, simply, simple.

Then why is so much of what we do still riddled with complexity?