“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” -Steve Jobs
In 1993, I was nine years old, and I knew that to be a big grown-up kid, I had to have the Roadmaster CR-2X. It was a bicycle designed to resemble a motorcycle.
Here is a vintage picture I found:
This bicycle had numerous features and was quite complex to ride, making it quite challenging to operate as a bike. I mastered the complexity and was super proud of myself.
I zoomed around the mean streets of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, and was so proud of it.
Imagine my disappointment when a mere six weeks after acquiring it, the bike broke. The plastic interfered with the wheels, and it was no longer rideable.
While we aren’t buying bikes, we often fall into this trap.
There are many reasons this happens, and in this blog, I’d like to talk about why this happens and how to guard against it.
Feature Fallacy
The feature fallacy is the mistaken belief that more features automatically make a product better. Piling on features can overwhelm users, complicate the user experience, and dilute the product’s core value.
The Roadmaster CR-2X had all these issues. I was overwhelmed learning how to operate it, and the core value of a bike was diluted because the bike broke within weeks of operation.
The feature fallacy doesn’t just live with physical products like the Roadmaster CR-2X I bought as a kid; it directly applies to software and even revenue management software specifically.
Let’s explore how the feature fallacy plays out in the revenue management system space.
Some of the revenue management systems out there work hard to have the longest feature lists. The approach is relevancy by sheer volume of features. The impact though, is often to overwhelm users and add very little incremental value for the actual revenue impact.
There are many examples of this happening, where the features they offer have a very limited incremental value to the operations.
For example, one is to have a dual interface where the RMS speaks to both the channel management system and the property management system.
This is practically unnecessary as the source of truth for rates lives in the PMS, and the channel management interface is duplicative without any added value. Another typical feature is having a ton of extra data points that add very little additional understanding in the process of filling reports with data.
I spoke to all this more extensively in an earlier blog post I wrote, titled The Value of Noise Reduction. The bottom line is that every feature should pass a test about the value it adds to the core purpose, versus the idea of just adding to the feature list.
Why Does This Happen? Complexity Bias The complexity bias is the cognitive bias that leads people to believe complex solutions are better than simple ones, even when simplicity is more effective. Complexity bias is a cognitive shortcut that our brains take to equate value, intelligence, or effort.
Let’s explore.
It shows up because we all want to be “intelligent” or get a “great value” or have “low effort;” however, we often don’t fully understand a product or an industry. Our brains need an easy and quick way to filter, and, in the process, they confuse complexity with effectiveness.
One real-life example is that we are drawn to believe that if two people say the same thing, we will believe that the person who uses the most jargon is the most intelligent. It also shows up when we want to “justify” the price of a product.|
We see more features, and we feel that per feature, we are paying less, so it makes it a better value.
Simplicity, by contrast, demands discipline. It requires stripping away the nonessential, aligning every element to a clear purpose, and resisting the urge to impress with bells and whistles. It’s harder to build something simple that works beautifully than it is to build something complex that merely functions.
The Roadmaster CR-2X wasn’t just a childhood memory; it was a lesson. Complexity looked cool, but it broke down.
Simplicity combined with a focus on well-engineered purpose endures.
How Luxe Pricing Applies These Concepts While Apple is the classic example of simple design combined with a powerful piece of technology, we believe that this applies to cloud-based applications such as our HouseCount RMS or LuxSell URS.
Some ways that we bring this to life are in making a terminal screen that has easy-to-understand data points that are color-coded and only includes key data points, versus overwhelming and drowning you with data and features that don’t add to the main goal: Driving incremental revenue.
