The Complexity of "Easy to Use"


November 1, 2005

You’re sitting down to discuss your message strategy with your boss or client. He’s listing off the product or service’s core features and rounding out the list is its ease of use. Gulp! You’re really in trouble if the first two on the list were the product’s high quality and low price.

That’s because “easy to use” is now an equal to “high quality” and “low price” when it comes to cliche product features. Bernard Taper asserted, “a cliche is a truth that no one believes.” You can now join me in welcoming ease of use to this auspicious club of cliches that no one believes anymore.

More importantly, your customers now expect ubiquitous product features like easiness. What can you do? Exclude ease from your messaging? No. You just need to use some additional tools to better define the complex issue that is your product’s ease of use.

Target the Solution
In order to be considered “easy,” your product or service presumably makes some aspect of your customers’ life easier. Find that fulcrum and leverage it. Focus on what is actually made easy for the customer by your product and less on the general malaise of your product’s ease.

Design Easy
(Designers take note: I didn’t say design was easy!). Isn’t it ironic when you’re reviewing marketing collateral touting a product’s ease of use and the piece itself is busy, text-heavy, and overly complicated? One of the most powerful ways to communicate your product’s ease is through design. Convey ease through design that is open, deliberate, and simple.

Putting It All Together
Part of the reason that product ease became cliche is that too many marketers became dependant on the generic label of “easy to use.” This is not enough anymore. You need to develop a system of ease into your message strategy that incorporates the ease to the customer and pulls in elements from your product development cycle. This allows you to tell your product’s story of ease, loaded with features, within the context of your customer’s problem. With your system of ease packaged, you wrap it up in the ease-centered design touched on above.

So next time you get the complex assignment of selling “easy,” remember to use these three tools to help you define it.

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is a strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World and Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. He is the Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, an educator at the University of Iowa, and host of the On Brand podcast. More about Nick.