Making your OSS easy to use isn’t about adding more “easyness” – it’s about subtracting what sucks.
“To make your stuff “easier to use” you don’t make it “easier.” You look at all the things that make it hard, then remove them one by one.Easy isn’t something you add. It’s what’s left over after everything that sucks is removed.”Alex Hormozi.
“Easy to use” is one of the most overused, under-delivered phrases in OSS marketing. It’s tempting to believe we can make complex systems simple by bolting on cleaner interfaces, streamlined dashboards, or a few more tutorials. But to reinforce Hormozi’s sentiments: “Easy isn’t something you add. It’s what’s left over after everything that sucks is removed.”
In OSS, usability is not a feature. It’s a side-effect of persistent effort to subtract blockers, confusion, friction and needless complexity. Teams that chase ease as an additive goal often end up piling more stuff on top of broken processes.
Before you can subtract the suck, you need to see it clearly and understand its ramifications. Perhaps the following Friction Continuum Diagram might help identify where the suck exists?
It lays out a taxonomy of pain: friction points relating to people, process, technology, data and organisational alignment.
Friction shows up as duplicated effort, unclear handovers, bloated user journeys, or undocumented dependencies between systems. These aren’t always visible in design sessions. They reveal themselves in overly complex variant trees. They reveal themselves through dropped tickets, slow activations, or endless workarounds created by ops teams. They reveal themselves in sales presentations that seemed to go well but were never closed.
When teams map these pain points instead of guessing at them, the priorities shift from what else can we add to what must we remove?
We talk about subtraction projects.
We talk about focusing on what moves the needle.
Here are some lessons for meaningful usability gains:
Users don’t hate your OSS because it lacks features – it’s just not word-of-mouth-worthy because it makes simple things hard
Removing one major friction point often adds more value than delivering five minor features in the blue arrow
You can’t fix what you haven’t felt. You have to truly understand, experience and/or visualise the friction before attempting to remove it
Simplicity, the process of removing what sucks, can’t be a project. It has to be a guiding principle. That means embedding subtraction into your team’s roadmap planning, design reviews and even KPIs.
Ask questions like:
What are we removing this quarter?
What friction have users reported but we haven’t acted on?
Are we measuring usability improvements, not just feature counts?
Finally, treat usability debt like technical debt. It compounds. And if left unchecked, it will overwhelm even the most well-intentioned digital transformation effort.
When you really think about it, Hormozi’s quote isn’t just a clever turn of phrase. It’s a product roadmap!
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Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
