Simplicity is highly underrated
Earlier this week I noticed Don Norman’s latest article, Simplicity Is Highly Overrated. As a designer, I take simplicity very seriously. (It’s in the first line of my bio.) So when Don Norman comes along and says it’s overrated, I feel obligated to respond.
Before we even start to take a closer look at this, let’s begin with the title “Simplicity is Highly Overrated.” Don Norman has been thinking about design for a long time, and lately simplicity has been a hot topic. The title is obviously provocative. Yes, simplicity can be overrated, but as design concept, simplicity is important, and, I believe, it’s too often underrated.
Getting back to the article, Norman makes his point in this paragraph:
Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven’t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.
The response from the blogosphere was vast, and I’ve attempted to round up what I feel are some of the most valuable posts here. One of the first popular responses came from Joel Spolsky who agreed with Norman and made a decent case for why simplicity doesn’t work as a long term strategy:
What works for bootstrapping, I believe, will not work as a good long term strategy, because there’s very little to prevent the next two-person startup from cloning your simple app, and because eventually you can’t fight human nature: …”The people want the features, says Norman. Just because handheld video was perfect for Blair Witch, doesn’t mean every Hollywood blockbuster will use it.
This is a good, but ancillary point. The meat of his arguement is in his conclusion:
If you’re using the term “simplicity” to refer to a product in which the user model corresponds closely to the program model, so the product is easy to use, fine, more power to ya. If you’re using the term “simplicity” to refer to a product with a spare, clean visual appearance, so the term is nothing more than an aesthetic description much in the same way you might describe Ralph Lauren clothes as “Southampton WASP,” fine, more power to ya. Minimalist aesthetics are quite hip these days. But if you think simplicity means “not very many features” or “does one thing and does it well,” then I applaud your integrity but you can’t go that far with a product that deliberately leaves features out. Even the iPod has gratuitous Solitaire game. Even Ta-da List supports RSS.
Spolsky made two mistakes here. First, the iPod and Ta-Da List are poor examples what he’s trying to illustrate. Yes, the iPod has Solitaire, but it’s anything but gratuitous: it doesn’t inhibit the use of the player and people enjoy using it. [1] And yes, Ta-da List supports RSS, but Ta-da List always supported RSS. 37signals never included it because they they needed to add features. It was part of Ta Da List’s simple feature set from the beginning.
Spolsky’s second mistake is that none of the definitions he gives for simplicity are correct. Most will realize that simplicity has nothing to do with matching the user’s mental model. Some will probably understand that simplicity means a lot more than a clean visual appearance. But not many are going to call him on defining simplicity as “not very many features” or “does one thing and does it well.” After all, the iPod doesn’t have many features and also it’s an excellent mp3 player. It also happens to have a sleek minimal appearance. This isn’t because Apple said “The iPod going to be simple, so it won’t have many features and it will only be an mp3 player.” This is because when you design with simplicity, you often end up with fewer features, and products with fewer features are inherently easier to beautify. Reduction is definitely part of simplicity but to say that simplicity is nothing more is to, well, oversimplify. As a designer, you have to balance simplicity with other goals, which sometimes emerge as features.
Dan Saffer chimed in and and reiterated this point. Saffer referred to this balancing act as “elegance”:
Elegance removes us from this trap. An elegant design contains the necessary, essential, and occasional features in a way that doesn’t impinge upon any of their uses, revealing and hiding them as necessary. Shaker furniture springs to mind, as do rolltop desks, Leatherman tools, and TiVo.
Luke Wroblewski, in his recent article “The Complexity of Simplicity,” gave this concept a different name: “gradual engagement”:
The most common solution for accommodating the needs of both average and power users without negatively impacting the effectiveness of either group is to gradually reveal complexity as users let you know they are ready for it. Though clearly a noble pursuit, gradual engagement of this sort is often quite difficult to design and implement effectively, as it is likely to require complex behind-the-scenes considerations for a product development team.
Wroblewski goes on to give an excellent example of why this is so hard: the menus in Microsoft Office 2003. Microsoft was definitely onto something when they designed this feature — a lot of users loved it, but it made the experience worse for just as many.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you call the pursuit of simplicity. It always comes down to the experience. And who better to make that point than Mark Hurst of Good Experience:
Don Norman is technically right that simple doesn’t sell, because what people are really buying is a good experience. Sometimes simple is good, and sometimes complex is good, depending on what a good experience is in a given context.
In other words, it depends. Hurst nails it by concluding that “it’s broadly inaccurate, and more than a little silly, to suggest that ‘simplicity is highly overrated.’” Smart designers know that simplicity is highly underrated.
[1] Recent generation iPods could be said to have gratuitous features, but like Solitaire, they don’t interfere with using the player and in some cases can be turned off so that they’re never seen. ↑
Comments
I agree completely that simplicity is highly underrated. But I think that Spolsky’s point about matching the user’s mental model is absolutely valid: it is matching the user’s mental model that provides the user intuition as to how the product functions. Case in point: BMW went to a new human machine interface (HMI) in its 700 series cars a couple of years ago. The interface was simple, but was not intuitive except perhaps to the designers who made it. Similarly, even a complicated interface can result in a positive user experience if it is intuitive, but the chance of a complicated interface being intuitive is poor — complexity is the enemy of intuition.
This point is also made in an understated way in your interview with Luke Wroblewski, who discusses the need to understand “user flows” and how bad decisions can “negatively impact customer experience”.
Good stuff, keep it up!
David Van Voorhees on 24 Dec 06