Johan Nylander (2007) Förenkla! så räddar du kunderna, organisationen och dig själv från krångel

The book I chose to read is a book about how to make everything more simple in a firm and growing market and in that way help your customers and make them happy, fill there need of simplicity to make their life easier and make them happy. Fun facts that are written in the book that might be new to some one are for example that 80% of all applications on a normal mobile phone are not being used, another one is that in USA only 15% of all returned electronic products are being returned to the store because they are broken, the rest because they simply cant use them. 

I see a lot of improvement to be made in the world so a good start is making things more simple, and that is what this books main message is, simplify it!

The book praises 7 principles focusing mainly on making things easier:

1. Leave the laboratory - engineers must stop making products for other engineers
2. Reduce - strangle the functional neurosis
3. Use common sense - it should "only work"
4. Cooperate - common standards for all
5. Speak clearly - to get peoples attention
6. Start from within - simplify your organisation
7. Simplify your workday - no one likes a stressed out person

The sixth principle is a really important one since you have to start somewhere and you cant really help your customer if you cant help yourself.

Pretty interesting fact on a study that was made, not surprising but as I said interesting that we always fall for a good salesman. The study showed that if you could choose between two cameras, the two cameras have the same price but one of them has a few more features, then you will choose the one with more features. Another study showed that if you get to choose yourself what features your camera should have out of 25 available features, most of the people who got to choose wanted everything but ended up whit an average pick of 19,6 features even though they knew some features would lead to problems. The last study showed that when they actually were given a camera with less features and a camera with more features they chose the camera with less features because they got frustrated and confused when using the camera with more features.

This gave me a good insight on how to make Aktia more simple and user friendly without making their customer or business suffer. A major factor in service design is the gap between the oldest customers and the youngest, since the youngsters desire more features and technical communication while the older people desire more simplicity and easier access to for example banks and their websites, buildings or phone calls.

That is where we will need to make the most improvements I think.

The book I read has been a lot of help for me, it has opened my eyes to a lot of things and hopefully will help me complete my/our task in Kunstenniemi with helping Aktia with whatever "secret mission" they have in store for us :)