For years I’ve talked about the rise of a new, digital generation of nomads: always on the move but never willing to forego access to the people, places or things we want. Whether chatting with friends or family, searching information, enjoying our entertainment, or shopping for that perfect item. Regardless of where we are, we expect to have access. But often overlooked is the fickle approach we digital nomads take with our devices. We move fluidly from phone to tablet to laptop, to TV and soon to our watch, and back again. Our choice of device is driven by the need for instant gratification in the moment, not by what is best suited for our given task. Combine this with decreasing attention spans and an increasing information landscape to explore, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and lost. Other leaders in the design community have realized this as well, and in recent years many have been calling upon organizations to more fundamentally embrace the concept of simplicity in product and service design.
Enter John Maeda, a master of simplicity, who literally wrote the book on it in 2006. True to form, the book itself is a great embodiment of the concept. Maeda spent years reflecting on the concepts before writing it, and then distilled his perspective down to ten (simple!) laws:
- Reduce – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
- Organize – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer
- Time – Savings in time feel like simplicity
- Learn – Knowledge makes everything simpler.
- Differences – Simplicity and complexity need each other
- Context – What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
- Emotion – More emotions are better than less.
- Trust – In simplicity we trust
- Failure – Some things can never be made simple.
- The One – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.
The biggest challenge with simplicity is that you must spend a lot of time in complex thought in order to achieve it – weighing trade-offs, practicing artful subtraction, and vigilantly defending the white space. You also need to spend a great deal of time looking for patterns, both inside your design as well as in the outside world. These latter patterns are the ones that your consumer, consciously and subconsciously, will be using to evaluate your product, to see if they get it, if it gets them, if it delights and seduces, in short to see if it’s a fit for them. In my experience, successful user experiences require strict adherence to these laws, especially with new products.
The first of Maeda’s laws, Reduce, is often the hardest one to avoid breaking when creating solutions, particularly those intended to define new markets or deliver novel innovations. It is important to apply careful curation to the features and functionality; remember, just because it’s technically feasible doesn’t mean it should be included. The same applies to competitive parity, requests from investors, or self-assumptions that others will like what you like. Without careful reduction, your design will fail before it’s built. Successful reduction requires a deep understanding of your users, of the where, when and how they will access your solution. If it’s on their laptop you can offer them more, but if it’s on their phone then what is their focus? Apple Mail and Calendar, Dropbox, Open Table are all examples of graceful degradation based on the user’s context. How much time will they spend with it? Why are they choosing to spend that time with your app? After all, they have dozens if not hundreds of other apps they could easily spend their time enjoying – yet something made them choose yours. You need to know what that something is, and how to build on that in order to keep them coming back. Remember, simplicity is not about making something that is simplistic – it’s about elegance and engagement.
Organization is the core of user experience design: clarity and predictability all come from good organization. It also helps with some of the other laws, specifically Time, Learn and Trust. A well-organized user experience, that is predictable and transparent, will decrease the time needed to complete a task. It will also provide the necessary foundation on which your customers can build trust with your product and your brand.
Failure is never a word I like to use, though I admit I have had my fair share of them. Success rarely expands our knowledge, but without the experience we gain from failing we can never move forward. At some point when you are designing a product, you’ll encounter a problem that defies a simple solution. Rather than give up on seeking simplicity, invite other people to help you. Whether it’s colleagues or customers, inviting others to help you solve the challenge is better than not trying.
In the end, it’s usually best to simply be honest and let your customers know that for now, in this context, or on this device, they will need to proceed slowly. Mindful of Maeda’s principle of Trust, you must assure them you are taking responsibility and that you are working to resolve their experience, to improve it, conveying that you understand there is more to do and that you are committed to simplicity.
While they do share a yin-yang relationship, the difference between simplicity and complexity in the context of user experience quickly moves the conversation to a competitive assessment. Ideally, your product is simple, while your competitors’ are complex. And in its simplicity, your solution appears self-evidently better. For example, Android offers more functionality, greater development freedom and a richer ecosystem of devices, contrasting to iOS, which is available on only two devices (iPhone and iPad) and has a considerably more restrictive development/store environment. However, the market data about customer loyalty and user behavior all prove that Apple’s solution wins from a simplicity point of view. Even if yours is missing a feature or a function, as long as you can find the elusive One—that is, the ability to make yours more meaningful—your users will make it clear through their engagement that they value your simplicity. Blackberry’s early products achieved the One: focused, singular functionality that was highly secure and easy to adopt. Unfortunately they were not able to keep that focus as the market evolved and they lost their vision.
While it should not be required to be codified into one of Maeda’s laws, making products that are meaningful for the people you are building them for seems to be common sense. Yet the failure of so many products to solve real issues, to have a positive impact, suggest we all need reminding that meaningful products are successful. If you’re lucky enough to start with a product that has meaning, following the other nine laws will seem easy. Achieving meaning is not a milestone or singular event. Meaning is transient and changes over time or within different contexts. It’s important to commit to an on-going process of reflection and evolution to ensure your product can anticipate your users’ needs in order to maintain its meaningfulness.
Simplicity is anything but simple. Simple is a state, but simplicity is a journey. At Ivy Softworks, we embrace simplicity, not only in our products but also in our culture and with our approach to developing innovations.
For more on Simplicity, check out John Maeda’s blog: lawsofsimplicity.com
Check out how Atlas.co is helping to drive simplicity in your digital life.