There is an excellent case study in NY Times on how Zen's ultra simple camcorder the Flip has grabbed 13% of the camcorder market and been the best-selling camcorder on Amazon.com. It did this not by offering every feature and tech acronym buzzword under the sun, but by making it trivially easy to use. David Poque says,

Instead, the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it's ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard -- it's a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.

There it is: the entire user's manual.

"But Oscar, we don't make camcorders or gadgets. Whats your point?" The success of the Zen lies in getting out of the way of users who want to record a video clip. User's don't need to adjust a million settings, don't have the option of adding special effects, zooming in and out, and so on. They just point and record. Next time you're building out a new web site, section of your web site, or any point where you're asking users to interacts with you - fill out a form, post a comment, make a donation - try to eliminate as much cruft as possible and reduce the interaction to its barest essence. Ideally, and I'm probably a bit of an idealist for writing this, this would mean an email newsletter subscription form that, shocker, has only one field for the user's email address, and no more. Or a donation form that is simply the amount to donate and fields required to process payment. The less hoops you make users jump through, the more users may jump through your hoops.