David Pogue says "Simplicity sells"

By Jason L.

Being a New York Times columnist, David Pogue was given the opportunity to test, rate and write articles about the newest and top technological devices.

The tap counter is someone who counts the number of taps it takes to complete a task. This is a major part of the talk; David says that it takes too many taps to finish a task on a PC. However on a Mac and a Palm, they focus on keeping it simple, because simplicity sells. If you think of many of the different types of MP3's, they include many more features than the Ipod's; for example: voice recorders, and FM Transmitters, but the iPod won. This shows that industries may now be getting the message that simplicity sells.

What makes the newest edition of speech recognition software so good? Well as they released the newest version they didn't change anything. This has never happened before in software, where they do not add any new features. For years people had bought this software, tried it out, and 95 percent accuracy was all they got, which means one in 20 words is wrong. The company got sick of that, so they said, "This version, we're not going to do anything but make sure it's very accurate."

To keep the audience alive, he incorporates comic relief. He broke out in three funny songs that he wrote, providing an overview of what he was just talking about. In addition to that, David made some excellent comparisons between Mac and PC. Being on Mac's side, David explains that PC's are to complicated, and Mac's simplicity, "Sells". He describes the "Print Page" on a PC as a look alike to a 747 cockpit, and "why would shut down your computer by pressing, Start ?" "Your call will be recorded for quality assurance, Mm-Mmm. Your call may be recorded so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD," David explains, he adds funny quotes from real users that have called in to the Apple help centre. For example, a guy called, his computer had crashed, and he told the technician he couldn't restart it no matter how many times he typed 11. And the technician said, "What? Why are you typing 11?" He said, "The message says, 'Error Type 11."

The hard part is not deciding what features to add, it's deciding what to leave out. Companies need to focus on the important parts, and keep their software simple, and accessible for all users. The more features you add will not make it better, so we need to remember as a motivation that: simplicity sells.