Simple to Learn, Not Always Easy to Adopt: A Random Takeaway from Learning Chinese
Lately, I’ve been learning Chinese.
It started simply enough. My boyfriend’s family is Chinese Singaporean, and they grew up speaking Chinese at home. I wanted to understand what they were talking about sometimes, and, honestly, make family gatherings feel a little more like home.
So I started with the basics: pronunciation, vocabulary, characters, and slowly trying to make sense of sentences that initially looked like a collection of symbols.
Then I met the characters.
Recently, I was having a small conversation with one of my Chinese colleagues about Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. We talked about why some characters look so different, why Mainland China uses Simplified Chinese while Taiwan and Hong Kong continue to use Traditional Chinese, and how Simplified Chinese came about.
Then I learned something I found particularly interesting:
Simplified Chinese wasn't created simply because someone thought the characters looked too complicated. The movement to simplify Chinese characters was closely connected to literacy and education. In 20th-century China, there were major efforts to make reading and writing more accessible to the population. Simplifying characters was one part of a broader effort to reduce barriers to literacy and help more people learn to read and write. And that made me stop for a moment.
Because suddenly, I wasn't just thinking about Chinese anymore. I was thinking about design.
If something becomes easier to learn, does it automatically become more widely adopted?
My first instinct was yes. But the more I thought about it, the less obvious the answer became.
If language were a product
As a product designer, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes something easy to understand. Clearer labels. Fewer steps. Better information hierarchy. Less unnecessary friction. So naturally, learning a new language made me start comparing languages the way I might compare products.
I’m Indonesian, so I grew up with Bahasa Indonesia and English. These are the two languages my brain naturally uses as reference points.
To me, Bahasa Indonesia feels relatively straightforward. The spelling is familiar, pronunciation is fairly predictable, and the vowel sounds — A, I, U, E, O — feel very consistent.
English, on the other hand, sometimes feels like it was assembled by several committees who were all late for lunch. “Though”, “through”, “tough”, and “thought”. And then there’s the difference between words like “see,” “she,” and “tree,” where somehow the spelling gives you just enough information to confidently pronounce everything incorrectly.
My boyfriend even agrees that Indonesian feels more straightforward, at least compared with English. Obviously, this isn't a scientific ranking of languages. What feels easy depends on your first language, exposure, environment, and what you're trying to do with the language.
But it made me wonder:
If Indonesian is more straightforward, why isn't English less widely used?
And that was when I realised I was mixing up two different things:
learnability and adoption.
Easy to learn ≠ easy to adopt
In product design, we often try to make things simpler. And for good reason. We want products to be:
easier to understand
easier to learn
less overwhelming
more accessible
less frustrating
But making something easier to learn doesn't automatically mean people will choose it, use it, or stick with it.
I see this in my own habits all the time.
There are apps I understood almost immediately and then abandoned two days later. There are beautifully designed tools that I thought, “Wow, this is so intuitive,” only to never open them again.
And there are clunky systems I've continued using for years because they solved a problem I actually cared about. Maybe they connected to something else I already used. Maybe everyone around me used them. Maybe switching would have been more painful than putting up with the annoying interface. Maybe the product was objectively less pleasant, but it did something I needed.
That’s the weird thing about simplicity. Learnability helps, but it doesn't carry the whole relationship.
People don't adopt something just because it is easy. They adopt things because those things give them a reason to.
Friction is not always the villain
When people talk about design, simplicity often gets treated like the obvious goal. Fewer steps. Fewer fields. Fewer choices. Fewer things to learn.
I understand the appeal. I have rage-closed enough forms to respect a good short form. Nobody needs to ask me for my fax number in the year we are living in. Nobody needs a 12-step process for changing a profile photo. Some friction is just clutter wearing a fake moustache.
But these whole experience or realisation reminded me that not every difficult thing is broken. Some complexity carries meaning. Some complexity gives a system its depth. They hold layers of history, structure, sound, and visual logic that I am only starting to notice. Reducing effort can help access, but removing too much can flatten what makes something rich.
These are some examples on how this analogy applied in product
A budgeting app should not hide basic actions behind confusing labels. That is unnecessary friction. But money itself is complex. If the app pretends budgeting is only about dragging cute icons into coloured buckets, it may feel simple while failing to help when rent, savings, bills, family obligations, and surprise expenses all collide.
A recipe app should not make me scroll past someone’s entire childhood before showing the ingredients. Please, mercy. But cooking has meaningful complexity. Timing matters. Heat matters. Texture matters.
A good design does not erase that complexity. It guides people through it.
The difference that matters
I have started thinking about simplicity in two buckets; unnecessary friction and meaningful complexity
Unnecessary friction
This is the stuff that gets in the way without adding much value:
Confusing labels
Hidden buttons
Repeated questions
Slow loading
Too many steps
Rules that exist because of internal convenience, not human need
This kind of friction deserves very little sympathy. Remove it. Make the path clearer. Let people do what they came to do.
Meaningful complexity
This is the part people may need to understand, practise, or think through because the thing itself has depth. Learning a language has meaningful complexity. Managing health, money, travel, relationships, creative work, and education all involve it too.
Good design should not pretend these things are effortless. That can feel friendly at first, then strangely dishonest later.
The better question is not “How do we make this simple?” It is
“What should be simple, and what should be supported?”
If someone is booking a flight, entering their passport details should be clear and boring. Boring is excellent there. But choosing between flight times, layovers, baggage rules, and arrival plans may need careful comparison. The design should not rush people through that just to look clean.
If someone is learning Chinese, opening the lesson should be easy. Reviewing mistakes should be easy. Hearing pronunciation should be easy. The learning itself will still take effort. That effort is not a design failure.
Adoption has a social life
The more I thought about English, the more I realised adoption is rarely just an individual decision. People do not choose tools, languages, or systems in isolation. We choose them inside a world that already has momentum.
English is useful partly because many people already use it. That sounds circular, but it is powerful. If your school, workplace, software, entertainment, immigration paperwork, or favourite corner of the internet runs on English, then English becomes valuable even when it is annoying.
Products work like this too.
A messaging app is useful because the people you want to message are there.
A payment method is useful because shops accept it.
A project management tool is useful because your team actually uses it.
It doesn't matter how beautiful your colour-coded project board is if you're the only person updating it at midnight.
A beautifully designed product can lose to a messier one because the messier one is already woven into people’s routines. That does not mean design does not matter. It means design lives inside a larger ecosystem.
People adopt things because they help them do something they care about. They stay because the thing continues to fit.
Simple can still be strange & difficult
There is also a funny emotional side to learning.
Something can be “simple” and still feel unfamiliar. Bahasa Indonesia may feel straightforward to me because it is part of my life. I have memories attached to it. It lives in conversations, jokes, food, family, signs, and small everyday moments.
For someone else, it may feel completely new. Even a consistent spelling system does not remove the discomfort of sounding like a beginner.
That discomfort matters in design too.
A product can have a clean screen and clear buttons, but if it asks someone to change a habit, trust a new system, or admit they do not know something, that is not a small ask. The interface may be simple. The behaviour change may be huge.
This is why “easy to use” sometimes feels like an incomplete compliment.
Easy to use for what? Easy to start, easy to understand, easy to trust, easy to return to, easy to explain to someone else? These are not the same.
A door can be easy to open, but people still need a reason to walk through it.
My Takeaway
My chinese learning journey has made me more careful with the word “simple”. I still believe in simplicity. Very much. I want fewer confusing forms, clearer instructions, kinder error messages, and settings pages that do not feel like escape rooms.
But I no longer think simplicity explains adoption on its own.
If a product is easy to learn but does not solve a real problem, people will leave. If it solves a real problem but does not fit their habits, they may still leave. If it fits their habits but offers no clear value, they will forget it exists. We are all graveyards of apps we once downloaded with optimism.
The goal is not to make everything as simple as possible. The goal is to remove the parts that waste people’s energy, so they can spend that energy on what actually matters.
People choose to adopt something when it gives them a reason strong enough to change, return, or keep going. Simplicity can open the door. Usefulness invites them in. Habit gives them a place to sit.
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