The Beauty of Simplicity

by Linda Tischler
FastCompany Magazine (November 2005)
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Meski sudah di publish hampir setahun lalu, artikel ini terkait dengan NPD dan cukup bagus buat disimak. Bahasan mengenai disain dengan studi kasus Google menunjukkan aspek kesederhanaan dalam disain produk. Tulisan ini sudah di ringkas dari artikel asli (7 ke 2), jadi kalau mau baca lebih seru lengkapnya bisa ditengok artikel orisinilnya.


It is innovation's biggest paradox: We demand more and more from the stuff in our lives--more features, more function, more power--and yet we also increasingly demand that it be easy to use. And the technology that's simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create.

Marissa Mayer: Google's director of consumer Web products, also Google's high priestess of simplicity though the technology that powers Google's search engine is, of course, anything but simple. In a fraction of a second, the software solves an equation of more than 500 million variables to rank 8 billion Web pages by importance. But the actual experience of those fancy algorithms is something that would satisfy a Shaker: a clean, white home page, typically featuring no more than 30 lean words; a cheery, six-character, primary-colored logo; and a capacious search box. It couldn't be friendlier or easier to use.

Complexity of function and simplicity of design: "Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open--and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful."

The original home-page design itself was dumb luck. But according to Hitwise, Google controls 59.2% of the search market, up from 45% a year ago; MSN's share is down to 5.5% and Yahoo's is 28.8% (after Nov 2005).

The stratospheric success of Apple's iPod also a marvel of simplicity, with 20 million units sold. In a 2002 poll, the Consumer Electronics Association discovered that 87% of people said ease of use is the most important thing when it comes to new technologies. It's often that --between the desire to cram in cool new features and the desire to make a product easy to use-- makes delivering on the simplicity promise so hard.

Google's research shows that users remember just 7 to 10 services on rival sites. So Google offers a miserly six services on its home page. By contrast, MSN promotes more than 50, and Yahoo, over 60. And both sell advertising off their home pages; Google's is a commercial-free zone. (MSN says more than half its customers are happy with its home page-but it's experimenting with a sleeker version called "start.com."). Google understands that simplicity is both sacred and central to its competitive advantage. Mayer is a specialist in artificial intelligence, not design, but she hits on the secret to her home page's success: "It gives you what you want, when you want it, rather than everything you could ever want, even when you don't."

John Maeda (the Media Lab's Simplicity Consortium): On one level, the problem is simply one of scale. Before computer technology, small things were simple; big things were more likely complex. But the microchip changed that. Now small things can be complex, too. But small objects have less room for instruction--so we get cell phones with tip calculators buried deep in submenus and user manuals the size of the Oxford English Dictionary to help us figure it all out.

Aaron Oppenheimer (Design Continuum): for each feature clients want to include they're trading off a degree of ease of use. It's a never-ending battle. "I spend a lot of time talking clients out of adding features, every new feature makes things more complicated , even if you never use them". In the past, adding features usually meant adding costs. Put a sound system or power windows into a car, and you've upped the price, so you better make sure consumers really want what you're peddling. But in the digital world, that cost-benefit calculus has gone awry. "The incremental cost to add 10 features instead of one feature is just nothing, Technology is this huge blessing because we can do anything with it, and this huge curse because we can do anything with it."

We also want our devices to talk to each other--cell phone to the Web, digital camera to printer. That requires a level of interoperability that would be difficult to attain in a perfect world, but is well nigh impossible in one where incompatibility is a competitive strategy.

Maeda hopes to right the balance between man and machine. That could lead to bespoke products--a cell phone, for example, with 30 features for Junior, 3 for Gran. "You can't make the world simpler unless you can get in touch with design, and the only way you can do that is to get in touch with designers". Start by simplifying company to make products simpler.