Steve Jobs made my life easy.

October 5, 2011

There have been many analyses written about what made Steve Jobs great, but the articles I have read have missed the key ingredient:  Steve was able to make things easy for his customers.  He knew instinctively that people would be more likely to use products that were intuitively easy to use, and his genius was that he was able to turn the idea of easy into the reality of easy.

My sons have saved my Apple IIe and the floppy disks with the  games they played.  We all love our iPhones, iPads, and Macs…..

I’ve been thinking about the  issue of “easy” because I had two “high-end” ovens installed in my kitchen this week.  Really, I just want to be able to put something into the oven and cook it, but the display is so complicated and the instruction book so inadequate that what should be intuitively easy, will take hours.  Will I love my ovens when I finally figure them out?  Of course, but the manufacturer has missed the boat by failing to provide the “customer delight” that results when something is actually easy to use.

Today, most of us feel that it has become increasingly difficult to get things done, so “easy” is now more important than ever.

As you may recall, one of  Renee’s Rules™ is:  Make my life easy.  This was one of Steve Job’s Rules long before it was mine.