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.
→ Ju Hu @ April 4th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
What about a laptop with no applications but able to run any applications?
Let the community develop and design applications they want?
Sounds familiar?
After sometime, simplicity still grow towards complexity because users increased = variety and expectations increase.
Probably we should accept the fact that we need to turn complexity into simplicity once more. But what’s new?