Simplicity As A Service
Who says tons of options and features equals a better product, service or experience? Consider stripping your idea down to its core. I challenge you.
What’s the difference between the Mac and the PC?
I’ve always stated that the true difference between Mac and PC — at least in the early days — was the fact that the PC showed you everything and anything. That including the things you didn’t need or want to see, where as the Mac only showed you what you truly needed to know and respond to.
I might exaggerate a bit, but usability (and emotionally appealing design), eventually became the decisive factor which established Mac as a powerful challenger to the PC. Decisions to strip the GUI from computer generated error messages and other weird binary codes was definitely one of the things which made the obvious difference in the user experience. And it’s something that we all have been trying to echo ever since, in our digital designs and intelligent solutions; a distraction free, balanced and relevant customer experience. Simple.
Windows Blue screen
Let me give you another example that I think most of us have experienced: The blue Microsoft Windows error screen! Probably one of the most infamous panic messages of all time — and an error message which made absolutely no sense to the common user.
Throughout the Windows interface our patience was often challenged with cryptic error messages and system codes from 0–499, and we usually only had one or two options: to click “OK” or “Cancel” or try the little red cross in the top left corner of the alert box. The only thing we as users could anticipate as the next inevitable step was, that after clicking any of the above, chances of experiencing the blue screen was just around the corner.
What Mac did was to simply remove all those nonsense error messages from the user interface. Who cares that “The application has requested the Runtime to terminate bla bla bla”? All you know is that your system is about to shut down, so hope and pray that you’ve saved your work recently. Otherwise, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete. A combination which, by the way, was never meant to be the standard for logging in or rebooting your computer, but something which happened by mistake. Note to all innovators: more often than not, the best innovative ideas arise from mistakes. This was not one of them though 😉
My point here is that by protecting the user from irrelevant “noise”, the overall experience became so much better. By taking away these error messages, Apple took away stress, frustration and subsequently a general distrust in the brand.
Smart. Phone.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone back in 2007, he first revisited the current “smartphones” at the time, saying they were not that smart. Phones like Nokia E62, BlackBerry and so on had this physical plastic keyboard taking up approx. 40% of the actual phone dimensions. Whether you needed the keyboard or not, it was always there and no matter what you were doing on the phone, the keyboard didn’t adapt or change to that specific context. In other words, you had a hardcoded QWERTY at your disposal.
What Apple did was to simply remove the keyboard, free up space for better things and introduce just one button. Simple.
Again, this doesn’t mean we as users don’t have the need for a keyboard at times, but it meant, that when we didn’t have the need, the keyboard wasn’t taking up our space! Intelligent, I would say, and something which we’ve begun to address in our web designs through responsive methods and similar content adaptive layouts and technologies.
So why “Simplicity As A Service”?
Well, because I believe that great products and services doesn’t necessarily have to be bombarded with features and functions and buttons in order to be great or to convert for that matter. Sometimes, removing things or stripping your brilliant idea from all the extra fat, can open up new dimensions and possibilities. In this busy world of technology consumption and an abundance of information, I find that people appreciate simple, relevant things. The simple things, which enables them to (also) do complex stuff. The more complex the task, the simpler the tools to do it = success.
This has led to numerous great methods and processes for designing better customer experience and forcing ourselves to consider, what the core content is and should be.
For more inspiration, Google “Paradox of choice”.
