Complex problems need simple solutions

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about simplicity this year. I’ve had a lot of really positive feedback from my conference presentations for Microsoft in Prague and Milan and at QConn in London. One of the things that’s struck me is that the most complex problems tend to benefit from the simplest solutions.

If you want an illustration of this, go to your kitchen drawer and look at the contents. If it’s anything like mine, there’ll be a mess of implements and tools and you’ll need to give it a rattle to open it. Be careful - some are sharp!

As a rule, the more complex the tool, the fewer uses it has.

There’s not much you can do with a hand held whisk other than… whisk things. Those electric cooking aids are even worse - dozens of complex attachments that only do one thing.

On the other hand, a fork can be used to flip burgers, prick sausages, smear icing sugar, make patterns in mashed potato, hold down food for carving - and whisk things.

Essential simplicity

The simple fork is essential. The complex kitchen gadget is not. The same goes for user interfaces.

About ten years ago I was asked to come up with a travel planner. It had to let users manage complex data about their travel itinerary and whereabouts and share this with family members. The interface grew and grew as the requirements mushroomed, the demands on the back end became enormous and the project eventually stalled.

Same problem, simple answer

A few years later, older and wiser, I was asked back to look at the same problem.

Second time round I knew the problem was as complex as ever. But I also knew the solution was not to create an interface that had a feature to match each requirement. Instead, I tried to create a simple interface that people could pick up and use as they saw fit. What I gave them was a simple ‘favourites’ list. They could also drag and annotate items (if they wanted to).

It was simple to learn, simple to build, and could be adapted to fit the various and complex patterns of travel planning that different individuals demand.

I’m really proud of that project. It saved the client a fortune in development costs, and it does whatever the user needs it to do.

It was also a lesson to me, that it takes a great deal of experience and insight to know how to make something simple.