The fidelity of simplicity
If you’ve ever read John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity, you’ll be able understand what immense frustration can ensue when attempting to ’simplify’ a design, sitemap, application or interface. While the ‘10 Laws’ are very helpful while providing a flexible framework for design, the ultimate usage remains in the hands of the user. How can rich feature-sets be designed to be simple?
Grandfather Complexity
Anyone who has attempted to make something simple has run into this issue. We remove unnecessary elements, simplify the design, distill the copy and even some functionality. But as soon as you take something away, you’ve got to put something in to support the new ‘more simple’ replacement, and viola! Complexity rears its ugly head again! The trick to this issue is prioritisation. What really matters is that the final interface, design or product is simple for the end-user. This is priority one for simplification.
Design, develop, test and research using the best method you know. Gather complex data and distill it into core values which can help drive your project to an ideal outcome. In this case– in the process– complexity is our friend. He’s the grumpy grandfather of Simplicity, and he will want to have his way. So sit down, make him a cup of tea, and bear with him when he talks about the war and how he used to walk ten miles in the snow, barefoot and uphill (both ways), twice a day. So we’ll listen to all his old wisdom and take it with a grain of salt, but it will always prove useful in building a simple and usable product.
The two levels of Twitter
People want to use things that work as expected. For instance, Twitter.com pretty much does one thing– micro-blogging. It’s a quick and easy way to keep tabs on friends on a high-frequency of updates. This is exactly the blogging-alternative that some people were looking for.
Twitter’s success lies in the simple brilliance of design and usability. Once you’ve logged in, there’s pretty much nothing to it– they give you a big text box and a button… you write something and click ‘update’. Simple. Usable. Desirable. You can get your head around how it works in mere moments. This is the way to do it– bring your main service to the front, and everything else in it’s own place. This is priority one.
For ‘level two’, they’ve arranged a secondary set of features. If you’re looking for extra information like how many times you’ve twittered or who’s following you, it’s easy to find out. There’s a rich feature-set without the fuss. No searching. Everything is one click away. This is a slew of great enhancing features all beautifully arranged into a secondary level of functionality and contextual navigation.
In a nutshell
Trust your instincts– if something feels too simple or even boring, trust the Laws of Simplicity to enhance it, and never give in to Old Grandfather Complexity no matter how much he insists. If something feels too complex, try some guerrilla testing on a neighbour or family member to see how they react. If you’ve tunnel-vision’d, outside input is the best way to beat the syndrome of a canvas which keeps going blank!
Find out more:
John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity
Twitter
User testing
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Suggest simplicity and core value are close cousins. If you can entice people to use a product or service around a core value the user then thinks about using the secondary functions. We often see products and service developed without thinking about the importance of that core function first.
rgds,
Dan
@Daniel Szuc
Good call, Dan!