Simplicity is harder to build than complexity. So why does almost every business drift towards the complicated version by default? We know that the average person makes tens of thousands of decisions a day. What to eat, what to wear, which email to open, and which to bin without reading (probably quite a lot nowadays!). By the time someone reaches your communication or brand, there's a good chance their brain is already overloaded and running low. This episode explores what that means for the communications and experiences we design, and why "just make it simple" turns out to be one of the hardest (but greatest) instructions in business to actually follow. Because complexity is rarely a choice the customer makes or yearns for. It's the accidental by-product of an organisation adding one more (often reasonable) thing at a time. Three departments each bolt a requirement onto a form. A pricing table grows another tier because nobody wanted to be the one to cut their option. A website gets built around the logical product catalogue instead of the customer's journey. From the inside, every addition looks sensible. But from the outside, it just feels like effort. And in a world where everyone's cognitive load is already maxed out, effort is an expensive thing to ask for. There's decades of behavioural science explaining exactly why complexity costs you. We dig into two studies that I think should change how businesses design their experiences. The first has nothing to do with marketing at all, it's about judges. Shai Danziger and Jonathan Levav studied over a thousand parole decisions made by experienced judges in Israel. The findings were really eye opening! Early in a session, or right after a break, approval rates ran high. As the session wore on, it steadily fell, in some cases close to zero, then jumped straight back up the moment the judges stopped for food or rest. The facts of the cases did not get weaker as the day went on. What drained away was the capacity to make an effortful decision. It would seem denying is the easier default. Kahneman picked the study up in Thinking, Fast and Slow for exactly that reason. Yes, our customers are not judges, but the mechanism is identical. They arrive at our brand having already spent much of their decision-making capacity, and when your process asks for one more effortful choice, they do what the judges did. They fall back on the default. For a customer, the default is usually to walk away and do nothing. The second is the famous jam study (always good when an experiment includes food!). Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper put out a tasting table, sometimes with six jams, sometimes with twenty-four. The bigger display pulled far more people in, but shoppers were roughly ten times more likely to actually buy when there were only six options. More choice attracted attention, then paralysed people at the exact moment they needed to commit. We look at who gets this right, and it's telling that the brands most praised for experience rarely have the widest range or the loudest marketing. Monzo. First Direct. Aldi. The simplicity you feel as a customer is not a lack of effort on their part. It's the opposite. It's a huge amount of work spent deciding what to leave out. We explore: Paradox of Choice: why more options pull people in, then stop them choosing anything at all, and why cutting choice at your key decision points can lift completion rather than hurt it Status Quo Bias: why a depleted customer defaults to doing nothing, and why "do nothing" is the competitor you're really up against Pain of Payment: why a confusing checkout or a form that asks for the same thing twice adds psychological cost on top of the actual price The Curse of Knowledge: why internal language leaks into customer-facing copy, and why making people translate your terminology spends their goodwill before they've done anything The episode closes on the paradox worth considering. Simplicity takes opinion, discipline, and a willingness to say no to internal requests that would make life easier for a department but harder for a customer. Most of your competitors won't be willing to do that work. And that's exactly why it's worth doing. So how much of what you ask your customers to do is genuinely for them, and how much is just your organisation's complexity, passed on? Thanks for listening. Si's book, Customer Experience Thinking, is out now in hardback and digital: https://mybook.to/CXThinking Connect with us! Instagram: @fabricxlabs Instagram: @si.elliott LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fabricxagency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/si-elliott/
