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Year of the Occam
How to get to the simplest solution in whatever you are building
What was your first portable music player? The answer to this question will definitely age you. For me it was a personal cassette player, but not the cool one from Sony. After a brief time with clunky portable CD players, I quickly jumped onto MP3 players.
It was early days and design aesthetics did not seem so important. It was all about the features, and the one I had from iRiver was the Swiss Army knife of players. It played MP3 files, but it did so much more. It had a high-res display, FM radio tuner, a note taker, and voice recorder.
At the time, the first generation iPod came out. It was slick and clean looking, but functionality wise it was pretty mediocre. With the release of the iTunes Store however, the value of the iPod changed from just another MP3 player to a music ecosystem. Apple took what was the most painful part of the MP3 process, ripping CD’s and loading files, into a seamless experience for any level of user. They won the complexity war not with more features, but with simplicity.
My recent post about building MVP’s provoked some interesting questions touching on the topic of complexity. In response to my statement that an MVP should only focus on what is of value to a user, someone asked, “What if that…
