Improving by Removing
The ancient mantra of ”Less is more” is thrown around a lot when it comes to design. Making a product as simple as possible by having less of it is something we as designers attempt to do almost every day.
It’s a fine line though, sometimes we oversimplify and try to solve this by throwing in a “getting started” at the beginning of the user flow to explain our super duper clever app/thing that’s just so damn simple a mentally challenged chimpanzee could use it. A perfect example of this is Clear, who’s tag line on their landing page reads:
“Life is messy. Simplify, with Clear for Mac.”
Except it isn’t simple, in their strive to simplify, they accidentally made it complicated. They created an incredibly spartan UI but the UX is far from easy or intuitive. I thought Clear was brilliant the first time I opened it and went through the “getting started” guide on how to use it, however, when I opened it again a week later I had completely forgotten how to use it and had to run through that guide one more time. That shouldn’t have been necessary, I now use Things for all my task management on both Mac and iOS and they never had to show me how to use it. I just used it.
Things isn’t very different or special compared to all the other task management apps out there but it works really well and that’s all I need it to, it get’s me where I need to go. This is how almost all users approach software, which is easy to forget as a designer.
Whilst our amazing attention to detail and willingness to perfect every pixel may register on some subconscious level. Most people just don’t give a flying fuck.
Things managed to get the balance just right and that is no easy feat. It’s easy to have less of a product but it’s really fucking hard to have just enough of it.
Making a good product is a lot like making a good broth. You put a bunch of different stuff in that pot and then simmer it down to it’s most concentrated form followed by removing all the leftover crap you don’t need. It’s knowing what to remove and what to keep in a product that’s the real challenge.
I recently made this mistake myself whilst redesigning Helishopter after a meeting where we came to the conclusion that we simply did too much and needed to remove some features. I redid the entire UI and amongst the changes I made I swapped your typical light on dark background search bar out for just a search glyph on a button that expanded into a search bar on click. When we later asked our test group to search for something, I remember thinking:
Everyone knows that the magnifying glass means search, right?
Turns out, they didn’t, in fact as few as 10% of the group managed to search for something without us pointing it out after a few minutes of frustration. I had fumbled and removed too much. I fixed this simply by adding “Search” next to the glyph in the button and testing again, almost everyone found it in seconds.
I thought I was simplifying the product and making the content more visible but I had inadvertently crippled them leaving them unable to perform a simple task. To conclude:
Less can be more, but sometime it’s just less.
