Cat’s Eye Three by KellarW | CC BY 2.0
In reaction to Steven Sinofsky’s recent post, “Everyone starts with simplicity, no-one ends there”, I started to wonder why simplicity is a dominating goal for both design and execution.
While the stages outlined in Steve’s article feel accurate enough, they lack some exploration of the term “simplicity”. Simplicity is a powerful and extremely relative word. The problem is that “simplicity” is almost always referred to in the context of the quantity or breadth. A tool that allows you to perform a thousand different tasks, but does each task in a clearly different and concise way is arguably still “simple”, even if it’s scope of application is large. You can do a million things with duct tape, but at glance it still appears to be a simple in its design.
I think that the ease in which somebody applies a tool to complete a task is the heart of “simplicity”. In the content of technology, adding features makes a solution harder to design. More options = more choice; which has a negative effect on the associated attribute of “ease to complete a task”. Just because there is a design challenge does not mean that it can’t be done, that nobody does it, or that the end product falls short of “simple”.
Is what Steven is saying really true? Does no-one really end with simplicity? What about MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, or the Google search engine? Are they not robust enough? What how about iOS? It’s been around for years, millions use it. I would strongly argue that the core of iOS is extremely simple, yet it’s powerful enough to support innovation of an unparalleled scale.
Steven states that the “skill-levels of your customers change dramatically”. That is true. I would argue that this shift drives a related shift in what is considered simple versus what is considered complex. We are seeing this first-hand at Mediafly. As the shift happens, the needle of “simple” moves, allowing you to have more (features) but still be considered “simple” by your user-base.
All of this let me to this end point. The execution of features is what drives simplicity, rather than the sheer number of features.
This is a guest post from Gregory McClendon, Sr. UX Designer at Mediafly. Gregory has 15 years of UI, UX, and engineering experience.
Comments are closed.