I spent this past week in Maine with my wife, her family, and a group of friends.  We stayed at a beautiful house in the mountains that was decked out with a great collection of A/V equipment.  Huge flat screen TV’s, an even larger home theater linked to PS3, a hard drive with 150 movies, Direct TV, etc.

The problem was that it was almost impossible to figure out how to use this stuff.  We had a bunch of technically savvy folks, but it took us two days to figure out how to use the hard drive with movies.  When we called the owner, he was completely baffled, and advised us to call “the guy who set up the system” who never got back in touch with us.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture.  Activating a home electronics system shouldn’t be this hard… it’s “consumer” electronics, after all.  If activating a system is this hard, imagine how hard it is to set this system up, or to troubleshoot it.

I think a source of this problem is actually excessive choice and configurability.  As is described in The Innovator’s Dilemma companies tend to innovate against the needs of their best customers and most advanced users.  But in the process, they overshoot the needs of other consumers who care less about advanced features or endless customization and just want to watch a good movie (ok, I’m paraphrasing the book big time).

The point is that simplicity goes a really long way.  Part of the appeal of Tumblr is that it hits you in the face with the few actions that matter (Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, Video) and when you choose one of these actions, the next steps are stupid simple.  There is a ton of customization available to Tumblr users, but the bar for doing this is higher than a service like WordPress.  But the consumers who just want to share their thoughts and a photo here or there have a perfect solution to their problems.  Also, we can easily piggyback on the efforts of those who do take a little more time to customize the service (thanks Bill Israel!)

I wish consumer electronics companies would take a page out of this playbook (easier said than done, I know).  But wouldn’t it be great to be able to buy a really good “home media center in a box” that is just rediculously easy to install?  Isn’t there a better way to control these devices than these unintelligible remotes with dozens of different buttons?  Isn’t there a better way to build these devices so that I don’t have to break my back trying to plug the right cords into the right holes, and the back of my media center doesn’t look like a jungle of tangled wires?

I think consumer electronics should be designed with simple-minded guys like me in mind 🙂