Simplicity as Innovation
This morning I came across this article on netbooks in my feed reader and a quote at the end of the first page really stood out. “In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn’t want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.” That’s a pretty profound statement that all designers should consider when making a product or design.
There is a sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, a sort of supply-demand curve for an effective design. Although netbooks are cheaper to make and would see increased demand because of that, the constraints of having to make the product cheaper for a specific demograpic enabled innovation. That innovation opened up the product to a mainstream audience.
As designers, we should embrace restrictions and constraints. It’s the essential difference between art and design. I’ve talked about simplicity a bunch of times in previous posts, but this article has illustrated that simplicity can also be an innovation.
→ Ethan @ March 20th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
This is true for me. I love minimalism, like your site. Sometimes less is more.
→ viva @ April 6th, 2009 at 5:33 am
Yes I think that is key when doing any product design. Although minimilist can’t be categorised as simple either, and a lot of people don’t think about that. You could have a minimalist site which is just as hard to use as a complex site.
I think no matter what we create as designers, we should have UX at the center. Whether a minimalist design suits the project or not is a whole other decision to be made.
→ Prakash @ June 4th, 2009 at 2:14 am
Great post! Couldn’t agree with you more. I really believe people complicate things to make it look sophisticated.
Edward Bono has a book called ‘Simplicity’ that gives great insights how we can achieve complexity through simplicity. He believes chess is a complex game cause it achieves it’s complexity through a large number of pieces so he designed a board game with just 4 pieces.