Simplicity is empathetic

If you reduce communication to its barest forms, does it mean you’ve simplified it? In the groundbreaking book 1984, the main character, Winston, converses with a friend who is drafting a new dictionary. His friend’s response describes a style of simplicity:

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You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words-scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone...After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words?

George Orwell, 1984, pg. 51

I say it’s a style of simplicity, but really Winston’s friend is not simplifying the English language at all; he is destroying the humanity that exists in language’s variation and color. In the same way, simplicity does not mean breaking communication into its smallest recognizable syllables but tailoring the content to the user by envisioning what it is like for them to read it.

To reduce operating costs, many companies automate everything they can. Phone triage to the correct internal group? Let’s create a robot that does this for us! Want to let a customer know you’ve received their request? Why not automatically send a response whenever they email you? We can shorten the interaction further by placing more detail and a list of questions for the customer to fill out before we speak to them. Brilliant!

These ideas have immediate effects on the bottom line, but they demonstrate a failure to empathize with the receiving end of these “innovations.” They expose companies that “focus on short-term stakeholder value instead of maximizing the number of loyal customers and recognizing their long-term potential (Arkadi Kuhlmann, referenced by (Siegel, pg. 66)).”

When I worked at Relativitity I had to throw away some of the “improvements” I made to my email process.

Any email I saw more than a half-dozen times or so, I would draft a concise answer to and save as a text snippet. Next time I received a similar email I’d paste the text in, look it over to make sure it fits the context and hit Send. The number of emails I could send in a day grew in number, but the chance to understand each customer’s individual perspective and needs was often lost by my over-categorization. I chose to delete all my snippets except step-by-step instructions and wrote every email out from scratch. To this day, I write every email out and modify my signature based on mood to make my writing more personal.

Another time at Relativitity our team tried to organize a process to triage customers to the right sub-team within our team. When a customer reaches us they’ve usually gone through two or three support personnel first. When we began, our minds were centered on making the process easy for us to use. After forty minutes someone pointed out that, were they a customer in this process, they’d be totally confused and probably frustrated. It meant a minor change to the process to hide complexity from the customer, but if we hadn’t spent a moment thinking about the customer’s perspective the impact could have been much worse on our customer base.

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