Whether it be the uber-complex “Chinese menu” of health care information technology solutions for hospitals to choose from, or 31 flavors (that come in “rich”, lowfat, fat free frozen yogurt… which really makes 93 flavors :P), or a phone that has a built in still camera, video camera, keyboard, MP3 player, wireless internet, cigar lighter, and miniature pipe organ… products and services are getting more complicated. And its largely because consumers don’t really know what they want. Sure, they’d love to have a miniature pipe organ.. shoot, if it was free, and something you could brag about to your friends, why not?
This week’s working knowledge caught my interest because it talks about feature bloat. The article talks about finding a happy medium and satisfying customers with less features and simpler products. It also talks about using more prototypes and product-in-use research.
The one point, that stuck out the most to me, however, is the consumer decision aid concept. There are tons and tons of products that are mind-numbingly complex and confusing to explain the value proposition of each feature to a customer. But why couldn’t someone create an application that graphically displayed (using some interactive flowchart) the most appropriate features and functions for them? So they could essentially choose the ones that they’re interested in, and the output would be the product that they should purchase? I know various companies do this on their website manually, but an app that you can just drop in some sort of decision matrix as a spreadsheet and would generate a visual interface quickly and easily seems very useful.
A preliminary search for customer decision aid on Google provided fruitless, and I haven’t heard of any business that is doing it. Anyone?
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