My co-worker Sam encouraged those of us working in product
design to check out a new book on simplicity in design: “The
Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life.” John Maeda is graphic artist, visual artist,
and computer scientist. Simplicity is a
personal mission for him – the first chapter is entitled “Simplicity = Sanity”.
In 2004 he founded the MIT SIMPLICITY Consortium at MIT's Media Lab. The consortium consists of roughly ten
corporate partners including AARP, Lego, Toshiba, and Time. The mission is “to define the business value
of simplicity in communication, healthcare, and play.”
This is a hard sell in today’s world where market demand
drives product enhancements which really means more features which equals
higher complexity. But Maeda sees
hope. The iPod (a device that he states
“does less and costs more” than its rivals) showed the marketplace that
“simplicity sells”. Google’s interface
is another example. And Maeda himself
participates in corporate efforts that go beyond citing simplicity for
branding’s sake – he was a member of Philips’ “Simplicity Advisory Board” which
seeks nothing less than the reorganization of product lines as well as business
practices in the quest for simplicity.
Maeda puts forth 10 laws for balancing simplicity and
complexity in business technology and design. (As the book’s jacket proposes, “guidelines for needing less and
actually getting more.”) The book
divides the laws into 3 clusters that correspond to increasingly complicated
conditions of simplicity: basic, intermediate, and deep. The final 10th law sums up the
entire set. Each law is accompanied by a short essay as well as one of his
personal conceptual icons that he feels is representative of the law. The entire book is 100 pages.
The book really is worth the very quick read and I hope
you buy it. The synopsis below leaves
out Maeda’s gift of conveying and integrating powerfully simple concepts and
giving the examples that bring his concepts to life. But here is a brief sampler:
TEN LAWS
REDUCE – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. And after you’ve removed everything you can, employ “SHE” – Shrink, Hide, Embody. Shrink – we bestow praise on that
which is small and high-achieving, and we forgive that which is small and misbehaves. “Pity gives way to
respect when much more value is delivered than originally expected.” Although he admits it sounds draconian, lowering expectations helps achieve simplicity. Maeda outlines tools the artist has to achieve
“enhanced small-ification” – mainly employing lightness and thinness (the iPod’s mirrored back; the Thinkpad’s beveled clamshell shape). Hide – hide the complexity through brute-force methods. His example is the Swiss army knife – only the tool you need is exposed while
the other devices remain hidden. Other examples include clamshell mobile phones and computer program menu bars. The key here is that the owner feels the sense of control in managing the expectations of complexity – they choose when to “unhide” and reveal more complex aspects of the experience. Embody – cited as more of a business than a technology decision, EMBODY-ing is the sense of instilling the perception of quality that has been lost after Hide and Shrink. Messaging and
other marketing devices are the primary driver for the Embody quality. Together, these strategies
help retain quality – “small is better when SHE’d.”
- ORGANIZE – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer. Maeda outlines the three options for
achieving simplicity in your living space: buy a bigger house, put everything you don’t need into storage, or
organize your existing assets. The
first two can be tackled through the REDUCE law. But the third, organization, entails
being able to cultivate meaningful categories out of the complexity at
hand. Maeda offers a process to
facilitate “seeing the forest from the trees” – SLIP: Sort, Label,
Integrate, Prioritize. Sort involves writing down each datum to
be slipped and then assigning them to natural groupings. Each group is then assigned a
Label. With the goal of reducing
groups to as few as possible, Integrate like groups whenever
possible. Finally, Prioritize the
most critical items to ensure they receive top attention (generally the
top 20%). The SLIP process answers
“what goes with what?” Maeda offers
a computer tool for playing
with the SLIP process. He goes
onto give examples of simple organizational methods (the Tab key, tabular
data) as well as an examination of “the gestalt of the iPod” (regarding
the design of the click wheel). He
finishes with advice to “squint to open your eyes”, claiming that all good
designers squint when they look at something to find balance and see the
forest from the trees – to see more by seeing less.
- TIME – Savings in time feel like simplicity.
All of us are frustrated by waiting and we perceive any quick interactions
with products or services as simplicity of the experience. That’s because
savings in time feels like simplicity, and saving time is really about
being able to choose how we spend our time rather than having experiences
force us into time-intensive sinks. Apple’s iPod Shuffle (only plays your songs sequentially or
randomly) and Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” are examples where consumers
will opt for time-saving over features. The SHE concept introduced earlier is used again here, but this
time to shrink time. Shrink the
time constraints and Hide or Embody the dimension of time. Progress bars make us feel like time is
passing more quickly. Product
designs embody the look of jets to make them appear fast, etc.
- LEARN – Knowledge makes everything simpler.
Knowledge of right vs. left allows you to know how to turn a screw more
easily. The acronym for this law is BRAIN: BASICS are
the beginning; REPEAT
yourself often; AVOID
creating desperation; INSPIRE
with examples; NEVER
forget to repeat yourself. “Basics” involves stepping out of your role as
expert and assuming the position of the first-time learner. If you cannot do this, then cede this
step to a focus group or hire human factors specialists like IDEO to help you. Repetition and simplicity are related,
and the author cites George Bush’s campaign messages during his successful
re-election run. Avoiding
desperation involves not trying to “shock and awe” the user with new
feature overload. “Inspiration is
the ultimate catalyst for learning”, says Maeda, and goes on to say that
“internal motivation trumps external reward.” He advises designers to leverage the
human instinct to relate (by using metaphors to allow users to map the
experience to something they already know), then translate the
relationship into a tangible object or service, and then ideally responding
to users’ efforts with some type of reward (Relate --> Translate --> Surprise).
- DIFFERENCES – Simplicity and complexity need each other. The ever-more complex technological
landscape ensures that simple products and services will always stand out.
The author likens the need to oscillate between these two extremes like a
sine wave, or like the fluctuating rhythm of a song. In fact, Maeda states that “it is the
rhythm of simple and complex that matters the most” – how often and where
simplicity and complexity are presented will determine how they are
perceived by the user.
- CONTEXT – What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely
not peripheral. The author notes that while “narrowness”
and “focus” are essentially synonyms, the latter should not always enjoy
the positive connotation that it enjoys compared to the former. Maeda himself was counseled by his
teacher Nicholas Negroponte to “become a light bulb instead of a laser
beam.” In the design realm this
entails achieving what he calls “enlightened shallowness” – considering that
everything out of focus may in fact be the most important elements in the experience. It is our culture’s tendency to want to
fill in the very white space that designers understand to be a critical aspect
of the design experience – nothing is
as important as something and
“when there is less, we appreciate everything much more.” As with complexity and simplicity, the
trick is to find the balance between nothing and something, between
directed (which to some is boring) and directionless (which to some equates
to being “comfortably lost”). Maeda
argues that “complexity implies the feeling of being lost; simplicity
implies the feeling of being found.”
- EMOTION – More emotions are better than less. The book acknowledges that the title of
this chapter seems in conflict with the first law (REDUCE) and goes on to give
a principle to help you determine the appropriate level of “more”: the principle
of “feel, and feel for.” Define
your current emotional state and then use that benchmark to empathize with
your environment. As form follows
function, feeling follows form. We
add emoticons to email messages, adorn simple iPods and PDAs with
cumbersome cases – all in an effort to add an element of self-expression (warmth,
emotion) to function. Maeda goes
onto ponder our affinity for emotional technologies such as Sony’s robotic pet dog,
Tamagotchi, NeoPets, etc. He ultimately touches on how modernism
and animism inform and express design, and how different Japanese
characters are used to describe the affection one can have for the essence
of an artifact. “While great art
makes you wonder, great design makes things clear” – the goal should be to
augment the relatively simple achievement of clarity with the more
difficult emotional achievement of meaning.
- TRUST – In simplicity we trust. Simplicity requires a certain level of
trust. The author likens this to
learning to swim – that moment when you realize that you could always swim
but until that point you didn’t trust the
water. Great design
helps instill that sense of trust. Maeda describes how audio maker Bang & Olufsen’s products aim
to achieve this – by utilizing impeccable design and simplicity (he
discusses their legendary remote control in the
first chapter), the products coax listeners to “relax, lean back”. Maeda offers that “we can only truly
relax when we trust that we’re in the finest hands and are treated with
the best intentions.” Similarly,
the omakase principle of deferring to
the sushi chef’s recommendations is representative of enhancing an
experience through simplicity-induced trust. We need to balance that type of
simplicity vs. the simplicity of the “undo” feature which is clearly just
a matter of convenience. We also
need to consistently keep stock of what we may be forfeiting (privacy) in
order to instill simplicity into the systems around us.
- FAILURE – Some things can never be made simple. While this is true, the author reminds
us that “there’s always an ROF (Return On Failure) when you try to
simplify – which is to learn from your mistakes.” He revisits his own laws of simplicity
and concludes that simplicity itself may fall prey to this law. This is why he concludes with a single
law that captures the majority share of meaning from the previous laws.
- THE ONE – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding
the meaningful. Maeda gives us three
keys to following this law: Away, Open,
and Power. First, Away: “more
appears like less by simply moving it far, far away.” The example of Google is
cited, whereby the user experience (query) is made simpler by keeping the
result local but moving the actual work (Google’s servers processing the
query) to a far away location. Second, Open: openness
simplifies complexity. Open-source
technologies achieve robustness from exposure and the collective attention
that it enables. Third, Power: use less, gain more. Just as our planet faces the challenge
of limiting consumption of limited resources, so do our designs. These very limits can produce an influx
of creative spirit driven by the sense of urgency the limits introduced.
This book is beneficial to those of us designing products
and services not just for the information itself, which is very valuable, but
for the way that it helps inform our perception and digestion of other
information. After reading this book a colleague
passed me two article URLs that focused on website experiences: Web Design from Scratch’s Web
2.0 Design Guide and Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Reading them after reading John Maeda’s book
made all the difference. Simplicity
really is at the heart of good design and usability. I’d urge anyone involved in product or
service design or delivery to read it. I’m
encouraged by his declaration in the book that the Jessie Scanlon will pen the
next installment, The Value of Simplicity, in this series by MIT Press.
For more information:
Comments