Do this once in a while to your complex product to make it more meaningful.
Over time, product becomes more complex. The irony of using design method like Design Sprint, that takes business goals seriously (together with user needs and technology feasibility), we end up adding more stuffs to grow the business. Let’s take the popular super-app Grab.
Started with a ride-hailing service, now you can see its homescreen cluttered with many stuffs. Too many stuffs. But what does it mean by being cluttered? Does less stuffs mean simple? Not really. “Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, it’s the consequence of simplicity,” says Jony Ive. When it comes to making things simple, John Maeda says it best, “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
Take a look at the top left screenshot. The first view when I opened the app this morning at 10.30 AM. At the top 1/3 part of the screen, I saw “Ride to Home” action chip. I was in the office (the app should be able to detect), and it’s 10.30 AM in the morning. Do you think this is meaningful? It’s meaningless. To be meaningful, you need to be aware of the context. If the chip were shown later close to 6 PM, then it’s meaningful. I need to go home at that time. Even better, if it prompts me around 5 PM to schedule a book because it finds the best fare for me to go home.
Another reason why it’s cluttered, because the “purpose and the place of the object” is not well defined. “Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product,” says Jony Ive. If you look at the 2nd screenshot from the bottom left, there’s this Trends Near You section. The content is about ride fares, it’s related to Transport, but it’s placed way down and far from the Transport feature. I (and maybe some of the users — and I’ve briefly asked some people) don’t care about the graph or history of the fare. Just give me the best fare when I need it!
Of course an app like Grab has done a good job in many aspects of the product, and it’s understandable as the business grows, more services with different features/content are added. But once in a while, all of us need to take a step back, look at the current product that gets more complex and simplify it by removing meaningless and obvious things. Make it a more meaningful product.
