{"id":8379,"date":"2005-12-01T14:57:08","date_gmt":"2005-12-01T21:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2005\/12\/01\/simplicity-itself.html"},"modified":"2005-12-01T14:57:08","modified_gmt":"2005-12-01T21:57:08","slug":"simplicity_itse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/12\/01\/simplicity_itse.html","title":{"rendered":"Simplicity itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

How making things simple and easy to use<\/a> is beginning to turn the tide against “feature bloat” in technology and software — Google being one of the stars in that fight:<\/p>\n

Google understands that simplicity is both sacred and central to its competitive advantage. Mayer is a specialist in artificial intelligence, not design, but she hits on the secret to her home page’s success: “It gives you what you want, when you want it, rather than everything you could ever want, even when you don’t.”<\/p>\n

That, says Joe Duffy, founder of the award-winning Minneapolis design firm Duffy & Partners and author of Brand Apart, is a pretty good definition of good design. He quotes a famous line from the eminent designer Milton Glaser: “Less isn’t more; just enough is more.” Just enough, says Duffy, contains an aesthetic component that differentiates one experience from another.<\/p>\n

It’s just that holding the line on what constitutes “just enough” is harder than it looks. […] Blame the closed feedback loop among engineers and industrial designers, who simply can’t conceive of someone so lame that she can’t figure out how to download a ringtone; blame a competitive landscape in which piling on new features is the easiest way to differentiate products, even if it makes them harder to use; blame marketers who haven’t figured out a way to make “ease of use” sound hip. “It’s easier,” says Charles Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research, “to market technology than ease of use.”<\/p>\n

The only caveat here is that simplicity is a competitive advantage per se<\/em>. Too many companies in the technology sphere see it as something they can use to other ends. “We’ll make it simple for you to use our X, because it will hook to our Y and Z.” But that only complicates things for people because now they have to worry about what X won’t hook up to. Make X simple, and make hooking it up to anything else simple, and you’ll get folks buying a lot of X …<\/p>\n

(via GeekPress<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How making things simple and easy to use is beginning to turn the tide against “feature bloat” in technology and software — Google being one of the stars in that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hi-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3274,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/01\/02\/confluence_3.html","url_meta":{"origin":8379,"position":0},"title":"Confluence","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 2-Jan-03 2:08pm","format":false,"excerpt":"An unfortunate juxtaposition of stories in this mornings Rocky Mountain News headline e-mail. *** Polar Bears take leap of shake *** Nine-year-old Kiersten Duffy was nervous about plunging into the...","rel":"","context":"In "Potpourri"","block_context":{"text":"Potpourri","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/potpourri"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":20648,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/03\/unblogged-bits-sun-3-apr-11-1730.html","url_meta":{"origin":8379,"position":1},"title":"Unblogged Bits (Sun. 3-Apr-11 1730)","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 3-Apr-11 5:30pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries .... 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