Simplify Your Product With Gestalt Theory

Yesterday I wrote about the first law of simplicity: Reduce (Simplify Your Product With Brute-Force Method). Now I’m gonna continue with the second law of simplicity: organize. There’s a popular theory about this: Gestalt Theory. “Gestalt psychologist believe that there are a variety of mechanics inside the brain that lend to pattern-forming,” wrote John Maeda in his Laws of Simplicity book. Some called it The Principles of Grouping. With the reduced elements that you have after you went through the Reduce stage, you’ll do SLIP: Sort-Label-Integrate-Prioritise.

Let’s see the elements that I have from the previous post (where I took Grab app as an example):

1. Epicenter — whatever the screen can’t live without (the term borrowed from 37signals’s Getting Real): Pick-up point, Drop-off point, Book button.
2. Secondary elements: Trip tag — that Personal thing, Credit Card number, Promo.
3. Not-so-important-at-this-stage elements or Useless (no one ever uses, or no significant impact to the flow): Logo, Notes, Schedule.

After the Reduce stage, I have:

1. Epicenter — whatever the screen can’t live without (the term borrowed from 37signals’s Getting Real): Pick-up point, Drop-off point, Book button.
2. Secondary elements: Credit Card number, Promo.

Now let’s do the SLIP (Sort-Label-Integrate-Prioritise)

Sort

Find the natural grouping of the elements:

• Group 1: Pick-up point, Drop-off point.
• Group 2: Credit Card number, Promo.
• Group 3: Book button.

Label

Give a name to each of the groups (you can always change it later, this is not gonna be shown on the app):

• Route (Group 1): Pick-up point, Drop-off point.
• Payment (Group 2): Credit Card number, Promo.
• Key call-to-action (Group 3): Book button.

Integrate

If possible, merge the groups that look similar. For this case, I don’t have any.

Prioritise

What’s the priority of each of the groups to help users to achieve the goals? Everything is important, but being able to set priorities would help to design the interface that flows naturally to the users. Priority:

1. Route (Group 1): Pick-up point, Drop-off point.
2. Key call-to-action (Group 3): Book button.
3. Payment (Group 2): Credit Card number, Promo.

This is so far what I’ve done to the interface by reducing elements and organizing them:

Ok, time is up. That’s my 14 minutes. Seems like 7 minutes is too short to write this kind of post. Tomorrow I’ll be writing about the third law of simplicity: Time. In the mean time, you can practise doing the first law — Reduce, and this second law. Please share the results in the comment section.