Laws Of Simplicity – Law 1: Reduce
This is a series that explores John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
One of the hardest tasks in the design process is removing elements from your design. The easiest way to make any system simple is by removing functionality. However, if you remove too much functionality it becomes complex all over again.
Ridiculous amount of options
Looking at a modern day DVD remote, there are just way too many buttons. How often do you use any functions outside of PLAY, FAST FOWARD, REWIND, PAUSE and EJECT? A DVD remote could easily get away with just 5 buttons and even less if you wanted to give the buttons multi-click functionality or a trackpad-like feature.
Leave it to Apple to simplify the remote
The problem with removing functionality is that at some point you have to ask what happens when there are specific tasks that you want to get done? Sticking with our DVD example, what happens when you want to reply a scene in a movie and you removed the REWIND functionality from your remote? What you perceived to be simplicity has only led to frustration in this case.
There is a balance between simplicity and complexity that must be achieved. As designers working with clients and companies, one of the biggest hurdles we have to overcome is telling the stakeholders no in regards to adding more to a design just because it can be added.
Airlines are notorious for having websites that seem to include every single feature that anyone in the company could think of. Design hero, Dustin Curtis, famously tore into American Airlines a few years back about their website. Some airlines have accepted the fact that they need to improve the overall experience by putting more effort into their designs. A perfect airline website to me would have a homepage similar to Google with four fields (departure city, arrival city, dates). Obviously there are a lot more things that people would want to do on an airline website, like check their frequent flyer miles, so you have to add a bit more functionality to your website. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the core functionality more apparent.
Delta with a wonderful homepage allowing for a ton of functionality, but keeping the principle of simplicity through focus.
Hiding Complexity
There are a million things you can type into a Google search bar to get better results, but all of that functionality (complexity) is hidden to the user unless they go looking for it. Instead all they have to do is type in the search bar and click ‘Search’.
On the opposite end of the spectrum you have software like WordPress that has a ton of functionality and has no problem showing you all of it front and center. If the main purpose of using WordPress is to write, you wouldn’t be able to tell that by looking at the admin homescreen.
WP could definitely use a ‘lite’ version that removes the complexity to keep things simple.
What is sad about WP is that I don’t think it can even attempt to go through thoughtful reduction. So much complexity and functionality has been added in because people wanted more features, that taking them away would cause a riot. Even if there was a lite mode that hid most of the complexity I don’t think most people would be pleased.
The Next Version
Because design is being thought of more and more at the beginning stages of projects, a lot of version 1.0 software is very simple to use. They do well in applying the first law of simplicity. The problems start to creep up when it is time to release version 2.0 that has more features. Instead of removing or hiding some of the features from 1.0, the 2.0 features are just tacked on to build out a more complex interface.
Word processors are a great example of how this plays out.
Although not the simplest of interfaces, Microsoft Word 1.0 wasn’t that bad.
After a number of versions however, the feature set grew so much the interface resembled a airplane dashboard.
Apple took the opportunity to make their Pages very simple. A competitive advantage over the rest of the field.
Aesthetics And Simplicity
When talking about simplicity many designers like to bring up minimalism and that idea that simplicity means without decoration. You can still have a gradient on your button and that won’t take away from the simplicity of your app.
Tumblr has a very complex infrastructure, but you wouldn’t be able to tell when you interact with it. Everything is kept simple and aesthetically pleasing. You have a number of different post types, you can follow Tumblr sites, reblog, quote and a number of other functions, but the system never seems to mentally bog you down.
This IS the post page. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Only Complexity…
The only complex aspect of this law is actually following it. Removing features and unnecessary bloat is very hard to do. If it was easy everyone would be doing it and we wouldn’t be cursing at our screens everyday. Finding the right balance between simplicity and functionality is what separates great designers from aesthetic decorators. Take the time to sit down and do some thoughtful reduction on your next design to see what the results can be. You might even surprise yourself.
Hopefully your client feels the same way.