3 Minutes a Day to Improve Your Simplicity Sense

I was at the Jurong East MRT Station — Singapore with my wife and kids, waiting for the train to take us to Raffles Place, when I saw an Asus ZenFone 5 LTE ad. I saw the mock of the homescreen, and gave myself two minutes to answer two questions:

1. What’s the obvious thing that can be removed from the homescreen?
2. What can be added to make the homescreen more meaningful?

Look at the mock below, and try to answer the questions above.

Asus Zen 5 LTE Ad

Got your answers? Now, find a person (random, any), and ask the same questions. Give him/her only 1 minute. It seems unfair to give the other person 1 minute, instead of 2 minutes, but it’s good to keep it short. The main goal is to practice listening to people’s feedback/opinion.

Here are my answers:

1. What’s the obvious thing that can be removed from the homescreen? The current weather. I know what’s the weather around my current location.
2. What can be added to make the homescreen more meaningful? Combining weather info and the calendar, I’m gonna add weather info for each of the upcoming appointments.

The next one minute, I asked my daughter, and she answered the first with: “I think the weather info is not useful. I can easily look out of the window to see the weather.” She didn’t get to answer the second question since the train had arrived.

That’s it. Only 3 minutes, and you’re improving your simplicity sense. Make this a habit, and you’ll get better in designing things with simplicity in mind.

Originally published at inspiringux.com on December 25, 2014.