I was thinking through about the design of a software that I am working on.
One of the objective that I would want it to achieve is, Simplicity.
Consider this. How many of the built-in features that comes with your mobile phone do you use on a regular basis ?
3-5 maybe. Phone, SMS, Camera ? What else?
If that is the case, are companies like Nokia, Motorola makng their products more complicated than it should be?
Creative used to own the MP3 market until Apple decided that they want a piece of it as well. Apple’s answer to Creative is not by giving more features or a bigger storage space.
It is simplicity.
iPod’s ‘Click Wheel’ hide all the buttons and give you one single interface to use. It reduces your interface points and organise everything behind the ‘Click Wheel’.
Another good example is car’s dashboard. I manage to find one doing a comparison between Volvo’s dashboard against Citroen.
I have previously touch on great designs by Richard Sapper. BusinessWeek also has an article, Fifty Years at the Drawing Board, on Richard Sapper as well . Iconic designs from Richard Sapper is really timeless. Look at Thinkpad, Lamy Dialog-1, and the Tizio Lamp.
How would one go about deciding what to add or remove?
This is where John Maeda’s book comes in. In the Laws of Simplicity, John oulines 10 laws as guidelines.
You can read more at his site: http://lawsofsimplicity.com/?cat=5&order=ASC
A quick glance, one will easily find that products from Apple, Richard Sapper and other notable great designers share some of these laws.
What does this means to software designers? I think simplicity would be an interesting topic to discuss.
A common request I got from users are, ‘Can we have more columns for the table?’.Well, technically, yes. We can do it. But, do you really want that number of columns? I have observed that most users need only up to 5 columns to use the system and be productive.
I will leave it to readers to decide.
What is the impact of simplicity on the success of a business?
NOTE: One side-effects that Richard Sapper probably never foresee is that the Lamy Dialog-1 is considered a dangerous weapon when you put it under the X-Ray scanner in airports. Believe it or not, I have been question more than once, asking me what is it? And even when I tell them it is a pen, the officers would still check and confirm.