Last week I attended a lunch event where Ken Segall spoke. Ken recently wrote a book titled Insanely Simple, The obsession that drives Apple’s success. In his book, and in his talk that day, Ken focuses on his experience working with Steve Jobs. Ken shared that Steve’s love of simplicity was at the core of Apple’s every success. As Ken explains, with Steve Jobs simplicity was a religion. The complexities of traditional business simply were not tolerated at Apple under Jobs.

Here are five key points Ken shared from his experience working closely with Steve Jobs, let’s challenge ourselves to better understand how these might apply to Higher Education.

1. Being simple isn’t simple
   Determining what academic programs to offer isn’t simple. Using good data to make academic program offering decisions can make it more simple.
2. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
   A one stop shop for adult students coming back to school from the first phone call to the day they start classes is simple and sophisticated.
3. People love you for making their life simple
   Online applications with pre-populated data, places to park on visit days, three field online inquiry forms, make prospective students interaction with you simple.
4. Simplicity equals brains plus common sense
   Using Google Analytics data and usability testing to understand where audiences go on your website and how it translates to an elegant user path.
5. Simplicity is the ultimate competitive weapon
   Evaluate the three most common ways in which an alum might engage with your institution. Are they simple?

In a world where we most value our time and have limited attention, how can we make individuals fall in love with our institution because of the beauty of how simple we have made it for them.

Can we apply these lessons to Higher Education? I think that we can. As anyone who has spent time in Higher Education will tell you, being simple isn’t so simple. There are complicated procedures to explain, right? From Tuition to Academic programs to Web usability to Inquiry, application and donation forms higher education is anything but simple. But if you find a way to simplify all of these programs and procedures and make your audience’s lives easier, they will love you for it. From prospective student to current student to alumni, they will LOVE you for it. Steve Jobs mission was for his customers to love Apple.

That should be our mission too.