A swag of recent articles have alluded to one of the big problems with the pursuit of simplicity: it doesn’t necessarily sell. Essentially (and at the risk of over-simplifying!) it is argued that people tend to opt for extra, usually complex, features over simplicity at the time of purchase – whether or not they use those features when they get the product home.
It is a valid point – there are few people out there marketing products with ‘less features’ (the iPod shuffle being a notable exception). But I still can’t concede that simplicity doesn’t have a place.
The best products and services manage to navigate the fine line between providing features to those who want them (or think they do, at the point of sale) and being easy to use and easy on the eye at the same time.
I would argue that the iPod is a good example of a device that meets both these requirements. On that other hand, we have a digital set-top box in our house which is so ‘simple’ that it can’t be operated without the remote control – this takes simplicity too far. Seems to me there is a balance to be struck here.
Piers Fawkes points out that a video or board game that is just ‘simple’ quickly becomes boring. Yet a game that is overly complex never gets played. The most successful board games have always been those that are simple to learn but offer endless interest: chess and Scrabble being the most obvious examples; Monopoly and Pictionary could be included too.
As Don Norman says: design presents wonderful challenges. And the challenge here, I think, is to balance simplicity with complexity in a way that gives the vendor the best result at the point of sale, and the user the best result when he or she gets the product home. None of that devalues simplicity – it just puts it into context.
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