Strive for Elegance, Not Simplicity
by Dan“Simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.” Thus claims Don Norman in a new article for Interactions magazine. Joel Splosky concurrs, noting
Making simple, 20% products is an excellent bootstrapping strategy because you can create them with limited resources and build an audience. It’s a Judo strategy, using your weakness as a strength, like the way the Blair Witch Project, filmed by kids with no money at all, used the only camera they could afford, a handheld video camera, but they invented a plot in which that was actually a virtue. So you sell “simple” as if it were this wonderful thing, when, coincidentally, it’s the only thing you have the resources to produce. Happy coincidence, that’s all, but it really is wonderful
I agree with Norman here as well. Rather than simplicity, I try to make my designs elegant, which is something different. As I’ve noted before, simplicity can remove something precious from users: control. Users sometimes prefer having more complexity because it can sometimes provide users with more control. Even if, as Norman rightly notes, users don’t use the controls, there is something about having them that is comforting. To which I’ll add the caveat as long as they don’t get in the way of doing the other (main) tasks. Which is where elegance comes in.
Simplicity may put too much control in the hands of designers. Which is sometimes ok, because we’ve hidden a lot of tedium and the internal structure (the machinery). But if we make everything simple, we’ll end up de-skilling users by only giving them the lowest common denominator in their products. Imagine if all cameras were point-and-shoot!
Elegance removes us from this trap. An elegant design contains the necessary, essential, and occasional features in a way that doesn’t impinge upon any of their uses, revealing and hiding them as necessary. Shaker furniture springs to mind, as do rolltop desks, Leatherman tools, and TiVo.
Nineteenth-century Unitarian minister William Henry Channing puts it best, in what could be The Designer’s Creed:
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common–this is my symphony.
May all our designs (the common) be refined, worthy, wealthy, and, yes, elegant.
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May 31st, 2007 at 10:25 am
[…] fit together into a unified product that can be sold and enjoyed. We don’t need to sell simplicity any more than we should sell complexity. We need to sell–and design–products that are […]