Simplify Your Product with Brute-Force Methods
Product tends to get more complicated over time. We incrementally add feature by feature, which initially seemed small, but then we ended up with “an app with tons of features.” Take a look at Grab’s app homescreen below.
Let’s do some simple design exercise to apply Laws of Simplicity here. I only have 7–10 minutes to write this post, so let’s put a condition: we don’t have analytics data, and the goal is to simplify the screen. Law 1 is about Reduce: remove things until the design breaks, then hide some features — which John Maeda called “brute-force methods” like the Swiss army knife — only expose features that matter to us to complete the goal.
We’ll start with defining the goal of the passenger: to get to the destination quickly and comfortably. Then list down all of the content and features on the current screen, and organise them into three buckets:
- Epicenter — whatever the screen can’t live without (the term borrowed from 37signals’s Getting Real): Pick-up point, Drop-off point, Book button.
- Secondary elements: Trip tag — that Personal thing, Credit Card number, Promo.
- Not-so-important-at-this-stage elements or Useless (no one ever uses, or no significant impact to the flow): Logo, Notes, Schedule.
What’s next? Remove all that fall under #3. Then for #2, either we show and rearrange the placement, or hide. We still can push this further, remove the features/content that fall under #2 one-by-one, and see if it breaks the flow of the passenger. If it doesn’t break the flow, let’s remove it. For #1, now we know what matter the most to help passenger to achieve the goal. I’m tempted to quickly design the simplified screen, but to make it simple (and I’m limiting my blog writing time to 7–10 minutes), you’ve got the point, right?
Notes: in the real project, you need to do cross-check using the analytics data to say that a certain feature/content falls under not-so-important or useless.
