Emulating Coco Chanel’s Legacy of Cognitive Fluency in App Design
The famed fashionista deeply understood the brain’s attraction to simple things. App designers should do the same.
Coco Chanel, born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in Saumur, France, 1883, impressed on the world a lesson today’s designers still cling to with a religious-like fervor:
Ironically, the life of ‘Mademoiselle Coco’ was far from simple. It had all the trappings of intrigue the Hollywood biopic machine could ever want. Raised by nuns in an orphanage, Chanel later spent short-lived stints as a hosiery store clerk and cabaret singer. From impoverished beginnings, she engineered a meteoric rise as an entrepreneur in the largely male-dominated fashion industry.
She counted Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Winston Churchill amongst her close friends. Her high-profile liaisons — including with English aristocrat Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky — kept Chanel under a constant spotlight. When her close ties with a Nazi German officer were unearthed, the glare of the spotlight turned into dismayed scrutiny.
Chanel’s most enduring legacy, however, lives on in millions of wardrobes around the world in the form of the little black dress, or simply ‘the LBD’.
The LBD boldly rejected the theatrical frills, towering fruit-hats and painfully constrictive corsets in vogue in the 1920s. Instead, it evinced the straight cuts, minimalist trappings and stripped-back elegance Chanel admired in the uniforms of Parisian domestic servants. If a component wasn’t performing some vital function or was extraneous to the whole, Chanel reasoned, it probably shouldn’t be there at all.
In a way, the LBD was just one of many applications of the timeless principle of parsimony — that, all things being equal, simplicity is to be preferred over complexity (a.k.a Occam’s Razer). However, it was also a sign of the times; the LBD reoriented the public’s idea of high fashion during the Great Depression, when simplicity, practicality and affordability became of paramount concern.
That the LBD still holds a sacrosanct position in the notoriously capricious world of fashion almost a century later demonstrates the power of a design philosophy premised on the belief that simple is beautiful. Naturally, this prompts the question: What makes something ‘simple’?
When blueprinting a science of simplicity, Harvard professor George Whitesides concluded that something is simple because it is predictable in function and behavior i.e. it’s easy for our brains to know what it does. To measure how easy it is for our brains to process or understand something, we use the concept of cognitive fluency. Importantly, studies exploring how cognitive fluency shapes our perceptions and behaviors point to a central idea that seems obvious, but manifests itself in curious ways: People prefer things that require less effort to process. They simply like simple.
One such study was conducted by the University of Basel and Google in 2012. In the mere 1/20th to 1/50th of a second it took for people to judge a website’s aesthetics, simple websites were perceived as being more beautiful than more complex websites. Websites with strong prototypicality — that is, containing elements commonly found in sites of its kind — were rated the most beautiful sites of all. Other studies found that easy-to-read fonts and minimal text help make a product or idea appear more attractive, regardless of its actual merit.
Chanel understood this human predisposition towards simplicity at a fundamental level. The LBD became as versatile and popular as it did because Chanel insisted it should appeal to the widest possible market. How? By designing it to be intuitively functional, never over-adorning or embellishing, while also lacking nothing essential. By keeping it simple.
Cognitive fluency reaches deep into the psychology behind product design, be it fashion item, website or app. In much the same way Chanel’s constant point of reference was the ease with which women of all shapes and sizes could wear and adapt her designs, modern efforts to optimize app usability should prioritize making interactions between users and the app as simple as possible.
To operationalize the lessons of cognitive fluency is far from straightforward. Designers often come up against ‘innovation’s biggest paradox’: Users expect tech products to serve up impressively powerful features and be easy to use. However, as even the most eminent titans of tech have discovered, products that are simplest to use are also the hardest to create.
Former Google executive Marissa Mayer once used a Swiss Army knife to illustrate this tension between complexity of function and simplicity of design. The Google search engine looks and feels painfully simple (like a closed Swiss Army knife), but is capable of accomplishing sophisticated tasks when you need it to (open Swiss Army knife). “It gives you what you want, when you want it, rather than everything you could ever want, even when you don’t.”
Applying the Swiss Army knife model to the design of an app involves constantly reflecting on questions the concept of cognitive fluency tells us critically influence its perceived value to users:
- Is the purpose of the app clear?
- Is the app easy to navigate?
- Can users understand how the app works, and master it, with minimal guidance?
- Can the app be easily tailored to suit specific functional requirements of different users, without coming across as overly complex?
- Is the app’s design (fonts, logo, color contrast, layout) visually simple and appealing to users?
TL;DR: Simplifying the design of an app — and thereby making it easier for our brains to process — can help it appeal to the largest number of users.
Will simplification garner a multi-billion dollar brand and legacy that ends up outliving its designer, as it did for Mademoiselle Coco? Perhaps. Who can really say? Given the outsized effects of cognitive fluency, it’s clear that without it, the likelihood of that happening is significantly reduced.
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Cogniss Magazine is published by Cogniss, a platform for building Human Transformation apps — apps that use applied neuroscience and psychology to drive better learning, health and behavior change outcomes.
