Complexity sells better!?

During a recent demonstration of our visual CMS, a potential customer shared his doubts about whether our CMS could handle a certain complex content structure. It got me thinking: why do some people equate complexity in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) with better functionality and more extensive features?

During Plate's 10-year existence, we have regularly been compared to website builders. We have always fought this with fire and sword, because with Plate, in addition to the intuitive, visual CMS, we offer a robust data structure that allows us to handle content extremely dynamically. Presumably, there is an assumption that visual and simple management of content and experience cannot go hand in hand with a comprehensive and reliable content structure.

What is happening here possibly sheds an interesting light on how our brain works. Could it be that we subconsciously place more value on a sense of sophistication that a more complex UX/UI brings? That we assume complicated designs mean more depth and possibilities in software?

Complexity bias

When I do some searches on this, I come across the phenomenon of 'complexity bias', where if there are 2 possible answers to a problem, it is assumed that the most complex answer is the correct one. I even end up with the Dutch mathematician and computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 - Aug. 6, 2002) who had a great influence on the development of computer science. One of his famous sayings is, “Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”

His statement seems a reasonable explanation for challenges we have experienced in certain sales processes over the years. And it is not for nothing that I have already suggested internally that we set up a demo in which we can also demonstrate the complexity that the CMS can handle when it comes to presenting content. Complexity can miraculously boost sales.

'This is not software'

Of course, this is not to say that we at Plate will embrace complexity. I remembered again the man of 60+ who came up to me after a CMS training for our cliënt Leergeld Nederland and told me how pleased he was with Plate's ease of use. He said, “This is not software,” to which I responded with surprise that the CMS he had just used to make adjustments to his website for the first time was really software after all. What he meant was that if it had been software as he knew software, he wouldn't have been able to work with it so easily. We could not have received a greater compliment that day and it further strengthened us in our mission.

In the coming months, we are focusing precisely on the virtue of simplicity. With an update to Plate's UX/UI due to our 10th anniversary in 2024, we want to eliminate unnecessary complexity to make it even easier to navigate the CMS and manage content. This fits completely with our mission: to give organizations autonomy over their content and websites with a user-friendly Content Management Platform.