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When contemplating return on complexity in an environment where there is no good mapping from "returns" to finances, the concept remains valid. This holds true for many if not most group decisions made after the functional requirements for a product have been agreed upon.

It is, however, necessary to redefine the measure of both benefits and costs of complexity.

From a user experience perspective, what is the cost of adding a small amount of complexity? Let's say that the complexity is an extra step in a setup process or an extra interaction in a voice dialog. If we arbitrarily define a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is "no cost to the user", 10 is "the user becomes likely to stop using product/fail task/??", we can map situations to the scale with reasonable repeatability.

You'll need to develop standard definitions for certain points along the scale - much like your bug severity definitions - to create some consistency amongst your business and development teams. A 2, for example, might be "takes the user a little extra time but creates no extra confusion or risk", whereas a 3 or higher would be reserved for changes that can introduce risk, confusion, or aversion for the user. By the way, a rating less than 1 indicates that the experience would be simpler for the user, and thus you are running your decision the wrong way - we are assuming that simpler is better.

Similarly, we can define the benefits resulting from complexity on an equivalent scale. A 1 would indicate no benefit; a 10 would indicate "there exists some measurable financial benefit". The reason for selecting that as a 10 is that a decision that results in measurable financial benefit can be mapped to financial costs and benefits, and the argument about whether to add the feature or complexity involves a different set of people. This "micro decision" ROC metric is intended for situations after the functional requirements have been finalized.

The final piece of the puzzle is one of company strategy. For some companies, if ROC > 1, the complexity will be added. For companies who wish their brand to have more to do with ease of use or simplicity, an ROC > 3 might be required. However, any ROC < 1, for any company, should be avoided.

In most cases, the ROC calculation will be unnecessary - a simple discussion of benefits and costs will be appropriate. The mere addressing of the costs of complexity causes many otherwise "obvious" decisions to add complexity to be discarded.

I've recently taken to using the phrase "return on complexity", in the same sense as return on investment. The basic idea is that every bit of complexity added to a product has some cost, and some perceived benefit.

For any product design or feature decision, I ask:

1. what are the costs?
2. what are the benefits?
3. do the benefits outweigh the costs?

This is simple in concept but more complex in implementation. Costs include increased customer service, decreased code reliability, reduced usage, and so forth - it depends on the situation.

In my experience, businesses assume that more complexity - more features, more options - is better. Time and time again the answer to some design argument is, "let's add that into the user options". This is not the right way to look at things.

Instead, start simple. Add complexity, such as a user option, only after weighing costs and benefits. Then, if it still makes sense, add the new stuff.

I'll talk more about this later.

If user experience is the brand, then what is marketing? Marketing is deciding how to get what products to which customers via which channels at what price, and how to tell the customers about it. Of course, each of these impacts user experience.

The normal domain of user experience professionals (usability, human factors, interaction design, graphic design, industrial design, etc.) is on the product and one potential channel, the web site. Retail stores and advertising are left to other groups of professionals, who generally do not call themselves user experience professionals.

In one model of working together, Marketing tells User Experience (and other groups) what product features to make for which user groups. The UX team then performs its own research to fill in the holes and determines detailed product requirements. UX then works closely with the development team to design and implement the product.

In a second model of working together, Marketing and UX have a more equal role. UX knowledge of detailed user behavior influences Marketing's decision on target segments and product requirements, which influence UX research and development activities. UX then works with the development team to deliver the product.

The former model is more common, but the latter can help drive revenues - particularly for companies that derive revenues after the purchase decision has been made, during normal use. If Brita water pitchers were really difficult to use, users would switch over to another brand. If Gilette razors are not smooth, users will switch. And if a wireless carrier has difficult to use products and a poor user experience in general, users will switch as soon as local number portability and their contract allows.

For the wireless industry at least, Marketing and Sales were responsible for the user experience up to the point of purchase; User Experience and Customer Care were responsible for the user experience after the point of purchase. If the company understands this, profits rise.

The beauty - and challenge - of mobile web sites is that they are used while the user is interacting with the real world. This presents a unique opportunity for certain advertisers.

Consider the point at which a potential customer is about to make a purchasing decision. Perhaps this point is negotiating a purchase of a car. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create and advertise a tool that is really useful at that exact moment. For car negotiations, it would be nice to know what tax, insurance, manufacturer rebates, and so forth are available; a loan calculator and lease calculator would also be useful.

Make your tools so good that nobody making the decision would want to make the decision without visiting your site (or a similar one).

Then find advertisers who would dearly love to be in the user's consideration at exactly that moment. Perhaps local dealers who have fixed rather than negotiable prices, or a pre-approved car loan at a bank independent of the dealership. The value to the user is high: these represent highly relevant offers for a decision currently being made from a trusted source. The value to the advertiser is high: the response rate for a particular ad will likely be an order of magnitude higher than usual.

Your challenge: find those points of decision and create a good tool to support them.

I keep reading about studies that claim the PDA is dead. However, whenever I look a little more closely, the article claims that PDAs are losing ground to smart phones (not Microsoft Smartphone, but the product category smart phones).

As far as I can tell, they define a Personal Data Assistant as a "device that stores contact, calendar, and task data, perhaps can run some applications, and has no connectivity. In fact, they appear to explicitly exclude MP3 players from the PDA category.

Apparently, a device can be a phone if it has PDA features, but it can not be a PDA if it has phone features. In other words, PalmOne's Treo series reduces the market for their disconnected PDAs.

So it isn't terribly surprising that "the market for PDAs is diminishing", using this artificial definition. However, it would be more appropriate to say, "more users are demanding that their PDAs have wireless voice or data connectivity" and that after the next few years most or all PDAs sold outside of niche markets will have connectivity.

What is user experience, exactly? In its broadest, most profound sense, it is an umbrella term referring to how customers experience a company, ranging from advertising and sales to product to customer support and billing. One can quite reasonably equate user experience to brand. In this broad sense, the profession deserves a corporate-level officer.

Most User Experience groups I'm aware of, especially within the wireless industry, are likely to have influence over the product and the web site. Granted, these are areas with complex information requirements, but they are a subset of total user experience.

I recently learned that a "major wireless carrier" in Atlanta is going to establish a user experience group. Bonus points for anybody who could tell me with of the wireless carriers in Atlanta - who adds 25 million customers per quarter - might be. According to this job description, this person will have influence over the entire out-of-box experience, including packaging and branding. This is a step in the right direction.

So what activities drive user experience? I think the answer in the broad sense is "anything that touches the customer in any way", and is not terribly educational here. So when focusing on products, UE activities include:

1. user or market research - feeds requirements gathering
2. user requirements analysis - can be done by a variety of user-centered design professionals, may involve personas or other techniques
3. features definition
4. industrial design - form, button selection, allocation of functions between hardware and software
5. information architecture - how the data is organized and presented to the user
6. interaction design - how the user will interact with the software
7. graphic design - how the product looks - white space, fonts, colors, graphics, layout
8. usability - measuring how well the product makes users' tasks easy to use or learn; can also include measures of pleasure of use
9. product engineering - software coding, mechanical design, etc.

I personally am expert at #2, 3, 5, 6, and 8. I am adequate at #1 and 4. I get outside help for #7. I work closely with the folks doing #9.

Keep in mind the above activities are only for the product's user experience, not packaging, customer care, and so forth. It is clearly a multidisciplinary function.