An idea must be complex inside (to the founders), for otherwise it is nothing and weak. It must not be complicated inside, for then the founders do not understand their own creation, and more time must be spent.

An idea must be simply represented on the outside (to the users). In a world rich with information, understanding something complicated is a heavy investment on the part of the user. This can only rise in correspondence with the popular belief of the worthiness of your product.

An idea that is complex on the inside, but complicated on the outside is ahead of it’s time. Users need catch up, so that it becomes more simple and obvious.

Some call this simplexity, the idea that a single button can connect to a complex series of events in order to start a car, run an elevator or buzz an intercom.

Taken from the other direction, I like the idea that to be useful something has to be complex. Otherwise there’s nothing left to make simple. In startup terms, you need to solve a problem. And if your problem is too simple, then it might not really be a problem.

The Laws of Simplicity get further into this topic, especially the law of differences, which says simplicity and complexity need each other.

“Occasionally people slip out the front door and then they wander.”

That was the problem facing a senior center in Germany. Their patients, afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s, would walk away in a desperate search for a reality that only exists in their heads. The story is told in fifteen minutes on an episode of the Radio Lab podcast:

“He sat on an advisory board at the senior center. And one day he came up with this idea. It’s one of these ideas that’s so out there and yet so simple that you think it just couldn’t possibly work.”

Install a bus stop. Or, more appropriately, a fake bus stop. That’s all it took to stop the wandering patients and give the staff a chance to notice they’ve slipped away.

Do you have a recurring problem with your website, business, or personal life? Perhaps you need a fake bus stop, something that works with the other party rather than against them… and still ends up giving everyone what they want.

It’s called unrut and I think it’s a good example of a version one product. I included only basic functionality–there’s a lot of room for improvement. But instead of spinning my wheels as I attempted to finish a marathon list of features, I kept things simple. Users can search for places and then mark them as visited. What remains is a nice little organized list of places to try.

Using only cookies, the site remembers what you’ve marked as visited. So, if a place comes up in a subsequent search, you won’t have to mark it visited again. Would it make more sense to include user accounts, so that the site would work no matter what computer you are on? Yes. However, I trimmed this from the feature list for two reasons:

1. It is not a necessary feature in order to get feedback from people on the concept
2. Every site should let you sample, registration optional, so the cookie functionality will remain even after I include user accounts

And how about incorporating location-sharing sites to automatically determine where you’ve been? Yep, that’s a good idea. But creating a first version is about pointing your ship in the right direction, not necessarily sailing it all the way to your destination. Use the two simplicity paths to figure out the core and just launch that. You can always add stuff later.

Since posting a message about it on my Twitter feed this morning, I received good feedback. Some people asked for the things I already knew I needed. Others have said things that didn’t occur to me. That’s the power of getting a side project out there.

We all have side projects and I’ve written about many of mine on this site. I’d love to hear about your side project. And if you want help getting it done in six weeks, let me coach you.

Has there ever been a time when the average person has maintained contact with more people? Has it ever been this easy to make these contacts public? Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and scores of other social sites, many of us see over lists of hundreds–or more–of individuals.

A study showed that we can’t maintain more than about 150 relationships. I’d agree that it’s tough to be real friends with more than that. But I’d also counter that contacts on social websites aren’t always exactly like the “friends” we keep in the offline world. This is especially true when contacts are more casual, such as on Twitter or when reading blogs.

The following are issues I’ve noticed with social software where I believe a little context would be useful:

• I don’t remember why I subscribed to your blog. I’m sure you wrote an awesome post that was linked from someone who I respect. Now you’ve written three posts about topics that don’t interest me and I’m struggling to remember our common interest. Google Reader, which I use for tracking blogs, lets me use folders and rename the feed. Those can help, but that often doesn’t tell the whole story.
• I don’t remember who you are or why I followed you on Twitter. You can see this is largely about my memory. As a simplicity practioner, I purposely expunge many details from my brain. This is another example where the software should help me out. Yet, there is very little to go on: your user name, your real name (which may not be set) and your bio. That’s often not enough.
• I can’t decide whether I should follow you on Twitter. Again, I only have so much information to go on. Hopefully you’ve included a link to your website, which helps a lot. Twitter, being a casual social network, skips the whole “friend handshake” thing where you request a friendship and then I approve. I like it this simpler way, but one bit of context that is lost is the message where you tell me why you want to be connected. That can be immensely helpful.

Got Any Ideas?

I see a few ways social software could help us out and I’d love to hear your ideas.

• Let me create a private note that I can use to remind me why I followed you or subscribed to your blog. LinkedIn actually has this feature (see embedded video), but it’s relegated to a paid feature. And LinkedIn Pro is over-priced at $25 per month.

• Track how I found you by remembering the blog post I read when I subscribed, or the retweet I clicked on before following you. Web analytics for publishers has come a long way, but similar software doesn’t exist to help consumers. I believe it is the job of whatever software I use to track content to help me make sense of it.
• Show me our friends-in-common. Facebook does this, of course. On Twitter, I need to go to a third-party website to figure it out. And for blogs, we can share individual posts, but there isn’t an easy way to share the feeds. If there was, I might be able to tell why I subscribed to a blog from the context of which of my friends also subscribe.

Have you noticed these problems, too? What solutions do you have?

While I was actively writing my book I would go to La Bonita (which I lovingly call “LaBo”) every day to put in a couple hours of writing. Then I met Ben, who founded Walker Tracker, and I started wearing a pedometer. Each day I could count on at least the 3,000 steps that took me to La Bonita and back.

I started to pay attention to step counts on other walks through the neighborhood. And I couldn’t help but think of them in terms of that daily jaunt down to get fish tacos. The hardware store is one LaBo away. A coffee shop on Killingsworth is about 1.5 LaBos, as is the tea shop on Alberta. A walk to the park, around the track and back? Just over a LaBo.

But I don’t expect this unit of measurement to mean much to you. It’s from my house, after all. And these are the number of steps with my stride. The beauty is it takes something that I can feel and makes it more concrete.

You could do the same and it doesn’t just have to be about distance. A puzzle lover might think of things in terms of how long it takes to complete the Monday crossword, in most newspapers the easiest of the week. “Wow, that Sudoku was a doozie–it took me two Monday crosswords to finish it.” Or, “This post office is busy. It’s been half a Monday crossword and I’m still not to the front of the line.”

There’s a precident for the LaBo, and your own similar measurements, in what astronomers call the Astronomical Unit. If you want to be a pest, try asking people how far it is between the Earth and the Sun. Most will ask clarifying questions and may even toil over how many million miles to guess (it’s 93). When they’re ready for the answer, just smile and say, “one Astronomical Unit.”

The Astronomical Unit helps make sense of how far away planets and other solar objects are using a unit that means more than billions of miles ever would. Step counts–and the LaBo–have had similar clarifying effects for me.

What units could you use to help you make more sense of the world around you?

I’m not sure why I never thought of this. Want to make someone feel good? Create a Google Ad using his name as the keywords. Then, when he does his next vanity search, he’ll see your message front and center (or, well, off to the right, probably).

This is exactly what happened to my friend Rick and I wish I could take credit for it. The advertiser is anonymous for now.

The same might work to get the attention of an important prospect. And there are all sorts of nefarious uses I can think of. But I prefer to consider the way it was used in the image above: as a simple, inexpensive gift that will brighten someone’s day.

(And, yes, it may not work with some more common names, but that just means you need to dig a little deeper to figure out how the friend searches for himself).

Rather than additional functionality, personal features are usually commitments we’ve made, or ventures we’ve taken on. In fact, that side project with its own feature creep might be contributing to your personal feature creep. As with creating real products, making your life the way you want involves questioning what’s necessary.

Zen Habits has a post on how to fix feature creep in your life, with a four step program:

1. Start from a blank slate.
2. Only add the features you really use and love.
3. Slowly implement the reduction in the code of your life.
4. Avoid future feature creep.

The process is similar to one of the two simplicity paths: build up from the core. And, though it’s twice the number of steps, my fix feature creep post can also be turned toward your own life. For example, “research before committing” is probably a good way to avoid finding yourself with responsibilities you don’t want.

The full Zen Habits post is worth a read, as it provides practical advice for each of the four steps.

Hat tip: Valerie Yakich

Now we have many choices when it comes to expressing ourselves online. Yet, the strange thing is, it’s getting harder. The tools are trying to do more and, in the process, forgetting the one feature that made them useful.

Adam Mathes has a fun overview of blogging text boxes, where he shows the current interfaces of popular blogging software:

The primary purpose of blogging software is to blog. This entails the writing and publishing of short form content. Everything else is, basically, noise. Even if you don’t subscribe to a viewpoint that harsh, posting something should be the primary action of the software and treated as such. This appears to be a radical notion, given their interfaces.

The only blogging service that includes a full posting box on its main logged-in screen is Twitter. WordPress (which I use for this site) is a close second. It contains a “Quick Press” option, though it is only a tiny version of the full editor.

Times have changed significantly in the ten years (!) since Blogger was launched. I mentioned earlier that there are many new ways to create content. Similarly, there are tons of ways to digest it. The blogging ecosystem has moved on from statically-generated HTML files. In addition to sharing thoughts, bloggers care about comments, trackbacks, pings, feeds and traffic analytics. It’s a more complicated landscape with more complicated tools.

That’s no excuse, of course. Mathes is right that blogging should still be central to the software. Times will always be changing and nice-to-have features will always come along. You have to keep your eye on the original focus, stop feature creep and find a way to make your site fit into today without forgetting the entire reason you built it.

I was covering MapQuest’s new directions API for ProgrammableWeb. Like most API providers, MapQuest requires developers to register. I thought I might have signed up, but the first username/password combo didn’t take. So, I decided to create a new account.

When I did, I was prompted with the following message:

“That email address has already signed up for an account. Would you like to have your password reset and your welcome letter resent?”

It’s a tiny change from the usual that makes a big difference. Most sites would simply present me with an error about an email address already being in their system. Maybe I’d be given a link to the forgot password screen. More likely I’d have to hit my browser’s back button, then find the form myself.

MapQuest has shown its developers understand the flow of interaction in that situation. It was just a login screen, but they put in that little bit of extra effort needed to make it work.

Login screens have been a common topic at Simplicity Rules:

• Adobe’s Hybrid Login/Signup Screen
• Band-Aids Only Hide Boo-Boos

Using their widget, I painfully scrolled through the months. I clicked on the year and scrolled forward, three years at a time, to 2019, when my new passport will expire. It’s a Tuesday, if you were wondering.

Providing a calendar to make a date selection is useful when it’s sometime in the near future. In that case, it’s easy to scroll to a few short months away. In this situation, it’s useless.

I’d rather see month, day and year dropdown boxes. Or, even a text box that looks for the formats used by most passports (I had it in front of me to type in its info, of course). Anything other than scrolling through ten years into the future.