“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.” - Charles Mingus
"No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it." - Alan Cooper.
It would seem intuitively obvious that a product that exposes fewer design facets to a user is going to be easier to take in, absorb, and understand than a product with a thousand bell and whistles. Yet, we continue to produce function-laden products and products with overly complex designs that confuse and dissatisfy users. There may be a number of reasons underlying this phenomenon including the perception that the more features available, the more useful the product. Design for simplicity actually requires some hard work. Here are some approaches.
- Ask a few questions about the function itself:
- Is this function really needed? Is there user feedback that substantiates the need?
- Is the function included to simply meet a competitor's offering. Do we know that their customers find this function useful?
- Sometimes the implementation is being inappropriately pushed into the user interface. Consider making this type of functionality automatic or behind the scenes.
- When facing a design problem, consider eliminating the problem rather than doing more design to fix it.
- Hide advanced functionality initially and allow more advanced users to opt in.
- Avoid visual clutter; have sufficient white space.
- Most important or commonly used items should get top billing.
- Avoid deep levels of navigation where possible and appropriate.
- Focus on shortening the steps for the most important or repetitive user tasks.
- Last but not least: test it with users!
