The Laws of Simplicity

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 10^th 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

1. 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.”

2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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.
6. 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.”
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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:

• Lawsofsimplicity.com – website companion
• John Maeda’s bio page at MIT
• SIMPLICITY Consortium at MIT
• Maeda’s blog on simplicity