Simplicity, Clarity, and Elegance in Digital Product Design
Assuming there’s already a product-market fit, what are some qualities that make a product fun and delightful to use? What in a product, apart from its fundamental usefulness, creates a sublime experience?
At Myntra, we evaluate and deconstruct all designs on three essential properties: Simplicity, Clarity, and Elegance.
Simplicity
In the context of user-experience, simplicity refers to the ease of using a product. Its often used as an overarching term to describe a product that’s not just easy to use but also efficient, and delightful.
When designers write about simplicity its often perceived to be about the simplistic, and minimalist visual style. Simplicity described here is not about visual styling but about the substantive content — core functionality, features, and behaviour.
Designing simplicity
There isn’t one way of creating simplicity in a product and it takes both the designer and product manager to create it collaboratively through:
- Relentlessly focus on user goals: Most users detest unnecessary complexity that comes in the way of getting things done — extra taps/clicks, page loads, or visual noise. Focus on the problems that your customers are trying to solve for themselves by ‘hiring’ your product.
- Limit options and build smart defaults: The action of reducing makes a product simple. It eliminates all unwanted features and actions and focusses on the primary task. Hick’s Law states: The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases. Reducing steps, simplifying, and providing smart defaults often implies more work for the designers and developers but less work for the users.
- Contextualise complexity — complexity made visible only when needed. Hide infrequently accessed information or controls and make them accessible on demand. This also helps learnability especially for new and infrequent users.
As Dieter Rams says, “Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity”. Great designers from various domains have used the power of simplicity. Brands like Muji and Ikea are well known for the simplicity they bring in the design of physical products.
… Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
Jony Ive on Simplicity (From Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson)
However, simplicity by itself is rarely the complete solution. To make a product understandable, designers look for clarity.
Clarity
Focussing on Simplicity helps the designer decide on what to include in a product while Clarity helps define how to present it. Clarity is about organising the content in a manner that conveys the desired message and leads to desired actions by the user. Clarity is the quality of being intelligible.
“Confusion and clutter are the failures of design, not attributes of information.” Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
In product design, clarity is achieved by bringing information and visual hierarchy across the numerous elements that exist on the screen.
Designing Clarity
- Organise and layer information, and visuals, in a manner that it reflects the importance of information: Visual hierarchy influences the order in which humans perceive what they see. This order is created by the visual contrast between forms. Create visual contrast through size and scale, colour, and density.
- Follow Gestalt laws: To decipher information and make sense of the visual world, the human mind looks for patterns. Gestalt psychology attempts to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. Gestalt psychologists list the principles of grouping or Gestalt laws of grouping. These include the laws of Proximity, Similarity, Closure, Continuation, Figure-Ground, etc.
Clarity can be measured by answering: how effectively does the screen or workflow communicate the desired information?
“Good design makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.” Dieter Rams
Elegance
In the dictionary, elegance is defined as the quality of being graceful and stylish in appearance or manner. In reality, of the three qualities discussed here, Elegance is perhaps the most difficult to define. Its because it relates not to the intellect but to a deeper feeling or emotion. Elegance is achieved when all components come together in a balanced way to make the whole just right. The feeling is similar to watching Roger Federer play tennis or the legendary Sachin Tendulkar play cricket.
Today, products compete for even a few seconds of users’ daily mind-share. Its no longer enough to have just a basic, functional, and usable product. Designers have to go beyond usability and create delight in the usage of a product. A usable product is only the baseline and its all about what emotions can a product invoke. The design of elegant products tends to be high on desirability. Elegant design evokes a visceral reaction to the product.
Designing Elegance
Design for emotions: Designing for emotions leads to a differentiated product. Empathise with users not just to improve the performance of the product but also to engage emotionally
- Give your product a personality: Reflect the personality of your product not just through the voice & tone of the messages but also through the interactions and visuals.
- Create Coherence: Consistency, no internal conflicts. The product shouldn’t appear to be a collection of features designed independently and thrown at the user. The interaction design and the visual design needs to be consistent throughout the experience.
- Create micro-interactions and animations: Tie the product together with thoughtful and engaging micro-interactions.
Together, Simplicity, Clarity, and Elegance in a product create higher engagement, stickiness, and delight.
The next time you review a product, think about how the design of the product can benefit from Simplicity, Clarity, and Elegance.
