Simplicity Rules

There are so many aspects to designing for the web, and few of them have to do with pretty colors or flashy graphics. Even though I’m not a designer, even code-pushers have to consider the many areas of design these days.

In addition to graphic design (look and feel) and interaction design (interface and usability), there’s often social design. This summer at Webvisions, Rashmi Sinha said to let people feel the presence of others.

Luke Wroblewski has some notes from a talk at Web App Summit about Learning from social Web Applications. Something that really jumped out at me:

Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.

In other words, you have to emulate real life. There’s a breakdown of the many elements of social design:

motivation, identity, control, independence, privacy, authority, gaming, community, and emergence.

Read the whole thing to find out the details of each element.

Earlier this week I was having dinner at a friend’s house when I spotted a book of Unuseless Japanese Inventions. Some of them, like tiny shoe umbrellas, are… not exactly as the title suggests. Others are truly brilliant.

The ones I like the most are very simple and solved actual problems. You can browse the book on Amazon to get a feel for some of the other inventions, both useless and unuseless.

I don’t have many problems with online advertising. It supports creators and makes services free. When ads start limiting my experience, as with Portland MetroFi’s free service, I feel differently. Because fast matters.

Broadband is widely available, but that’s no excuse to run bloated ads. Like I’ve said before, I don’t mind most online advertising, but that doesn’t mean I want to wait for it to load. Fast still matters.

It’s been almost a year since my Three Rules for Social Websites and many of my feelings are the same. I’ve found the ones that I really like are those that emulate real life. They make it easy to take my real world communication online.

That’s what I’ve liked about del.icio.us. Tagging something “for” a friend has replaced the emails with links I used to send out.

Recently LinkedIn added questions and answers. This allows me to ask questions and provide answers to not only my friends, but my friends-of-friends. This is networking with a purpose, and it’s emulating, and improving upon, real life.

I’ve also played with Facebook and found it a very pleasant tool. If this was around while I was in college, I think I’d have found it indispensable. It does a good job of emulating groups of friends and supplementing offline communication.

Social networks need to find innovative ways to emulate real life. The market for social sites that do something beyond connect people is virtually unlimited.

The world isn’t as big as we think it is. Our little corner may be excited about Thing A, but that does not mean everybody feels the same way, as much as it seems like it.

Eric Sink, from Baptists and Boundaries:

One of my favorite things about the web is all the individual communities that live there in the form of discussion boards. The web connects people in ways that were never possible before. When we find ourselves in a discussion forum with people from five different continents, that forum looks really big. But it’s still just five people.

The niches of niches are pretty interesting to me, but they can be dangerous. If you find yourself caught in this trap, it may be time to think bigger.

As I said in Everybody rarely means everybody:

Sometimes I read Webmaster forums, and I’m perplexed at how popular it is for participants to create their own Webmaster resources. Why? Because they see it as a lucrative business to be in because everybody cares about it like they do.

Read Eric’s entire piece and, unless you’re Baptist, check out the joke.

As I’ve thought about the different things simplicity can mean, I realized there’s a big difference between making something simple for me and making something simple for someone else. Worse yet, if we only focus on making life simple for ourselves, that’s when some of the most complex things for others are made.

Suckbusters has a story about Notepad’s confirmation box. I’m not sure if it’s as bad as the author says, but the point is that the programmers weren’t thinking like a user. They were making things easy on themselves.

It takes simplicity for most of us to be able to be productive, much like Tom’s simple answer about clearing his mind.

When I start a new project, I always need to trim it down to make sense of its simplest state. Once I have a rough draft version, I can add the obvious features first.

The trouble is knowing when it’s worth making my life a little more complex. Usually if I think in terms of how a feature should be, I realize it’s worth whatever technical hurdles there are to get there.

Joel Spolsky calls this bringing “the program model in line with the user model.” His book User Interface Design for Programmers is worth a read even if you aren’t a programmer.

I’m not much of a stock market guy, but I have periodically bought shares of companies I believe in. One of those is Yahoo!. I think their content strategy resonates with most people, and we each have at least one “channel” we could return to daily.

The last year was pretty bad for YHOO, the stock. My investment was minimal, so I haven’t lost much money. I have lost a little bit of faith in the company. At every turn, their excuse is the delayed launch of their new advertising system, “Panama.”

This reminds me of a future-bound personal rut we’ve probably all succumbed to in some way:

• Life will be different when I start driving.
• It’ll all be better once high school is over
• Well, I just need to get through college…
• Once I have a job…
• First I need a house
• After the first million, I’ll relax

The answer is to live in the now. As new-agey as it seems (though I mean it as a Wayne’s World reference), it solves the personal rut, and gets the focus off some silver bullet. There rarely are silver bullets that make everything perfect. Panama won’t be one.

Brad Feld says Yahoo! should “take a shot this time at being bold (rather than just follow ’slow and steady execution’) if they really want to assault Google this time around.” That sounds like in the now thinking. Way.

There were some great definitions of simplicity that I thought I would share.

Tom:

Maybe it’s just because I finished up GTD, but for me simplicity is getting everything out of my mind so I can make right choices, well, simply.

Noah:

that is a great question about something so simple that we hardly think about it. maybe that is what simple means to me

“something you understand without instructions”

Jon:

Simplicity is one of those things that only ever pops into my head when it’s absent. It’s not something anyone achieves, but success is marked in how closely one comes to it–sort of like being a good person, or golfing a perfect game.

Great stuff guys. Thanks for sharing.

We all deal with information overload. Staying on top of email is my number one priority. It helps me remain in contact with colleagues, family, friends, and even strangers.

The solution that works for me is to keep my inbox clean. When new messages come in, I make a decision about them right away:

1. Answer right away, if it’s short
2. Delete it
3. Decide when I’ll act on it or reply

When I don’t reply immediately or delete the email, I drag it to a sub-folder of my “reply later” box. I have a folder for each weekday, one for the weekend, and another for the following week.

To plow through a lot of messages, either in my inbox in the morning, or in a daily box that has built up, I use the tips from The Empty Inbox.

With every new Apple product announcement come the stories of how the Cupertino folks like to keep it simple. The iPhone’s details were a secret, but everyone knew it was coming. The big news was how Apple had changed the game, making a phone that’s intuitive.

I had a Sidekick back in 2003. That’s when I learned there’s nothing quite like access to a full QWERTY keyboard. The iPhone has it, but I clicked all over Apple’s website yesterday trying to find it.

John Maeda, author of The Laws of Simplicity, had the patience to watch the entire demo (or the keynote). The keyboard is part of the touch screen and reacts to hovering fingers. He calls it On-demand largeness. Pretty cool.

Greg Bell not only lauds the iPhone, but says that most phone manufacturers suffer from UI Laziness. That’s a good way to put it. Don’t blame constraints, but embrace them and find a creative solution. That’s how to separate simplicity from laziness.

But say, what do you think? It may be worth a copy of Maeda’s book. Details here.