Just had the opportunity to participate at a conference here in Colombo, featuring Ken Segall, the former Creative Director of Apple, having a speech about what makes Apple so successful around the world:
Simplicity.
To Steve Jobs, Simplicity was a religion. He built a company based on its principles, in which the complexities of traditional business were simply not tolerated. Simplicity was also his most powerful weapon—a means of humbling category leaders once thought to be invincible.
Instead of going into details about the book “Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success”, Mr. Segall managed to explain the whole “behind the scenes of Apple” with few points:
1) Simplicity is LOVE.
The main goal of Steve Jobs was to build emotions between the product and the consumer: “We love the users“, he used to say at every meeting and conference – “And it’s nice to be loved” . Nice one!
Human beings are attached to simple things, no matter how much innovation can go ahead. We all love to have an easy approach to technology.
Branding is love.
2) Do fewer things better.
Reducing features is the key to an easy management of the product.
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove” -Antoine de Saint-Exubery
3) Words matter.
4) Minimize.
Minimize words, humanize words. There is a difference when you say:
“I forgot my Mac at home” or “I forgot my ASUS Gxxx RGB at home”
Everything comes back there, to one point: being simple. But don’t get it wrong:
“Being simple isn’t simple”
If we think about it deeply, we can relate all these points to our social and private lives as well. When we look for someone special, we don’t look for the hottest person in the world, with tons of make-up on the face, or kilos of muscles around; neither we want to be caught in so many beautiful words, but no real actions.
That is just the attention that drive us there. But what we actually look for isn’t the appearance, but his/her deepest simplicity: it can be a smile, a touch of hand, an intense sweet look, or even those ‘perfect imperfections”. They are called simple details. And that’s where Love is found.
Happy simplification!
=)
feddysworld 