Simplicity Rules

I just moved out of a big house and into an apartment. Looking ahead to the move, I had anxiety about the sheer amount of stuff. This feeling stayed with me all the way up until the day I decided to take a full audit of what we’d be moving. Once I had it all in my vision, it was easy to see what we’d sell, what we’d give away, what we’d throw away, and what we’d move. Knowing that full story made for a better move and a much less anxious Adam.

My friend Mike Duffy has some great stuff to say about one tiny piece of info every web site should know at his winery website blog. Lately I have been paying more attention to visitor stats because, like finally examining the junk in our basement, it helps me have a full view of what’s going on.

There’s a John D. Rockefeller quote going around that harkens to the same point:

Everything that is watched improves.

It’s not a new idea, but it is a very strong concept. It’s the gist of every diet. It’s the reason the principal comes into a rowdy classroom. It’s why, in business, everyone sets goals.

Microsoft’s MSN has “redesigned” their House and Home channel and split it off into real estate and lifestyle. It seems like a good decision. MSN had lumped a lot of stuff under the one section. Among them: bathroom gadgets, kitchen remodeling, a halloween guide, and an ode to soy.

Google, supposedly Microsoft’s new arch rival, lists 75,000 articles about House and Home. And Google sends lots of traffic to MSN for these links, which are ranked high in searches. Each and every one of those links to specific articles now gets the following “page:”

We’ve redesigned our pages to serve you better!

• Visit realestate.msn.com pages for home listings, financing, and home improvement services.
• Visit lifestyle.msn.com to learn more about home decoration, recipes, and better living.

In response to feedback from customers, we have created two sites focusing on your request for more in depth, relevant content and information.

Some people say it’s easy to pick on Microsoft. Maybe so, but they aren’t making it any harder. It’s not an easy task to archive thousands of articles, but such is the life of a web publisher. I believe this goes beyond making the smart choice, which is to redirect to new versions of those articles. All sites, especially large ones, have a responsibility to do the right thing.

Thom Singer writes of a Twilight Zone episode about kind aliens coming to a small town to share their gospel, “To Serve Man.” The dramatic conclusion has the townsfolk realizing what definition of “serve” the aliens are using.

Unfortunately, it seems in MSN’s effort “to serve you better,” they are taking one straight from this episode.

Full disclosure: I work for DuVinci, who has a client that is a partner of MSN. I know that’s a little “six degrees,” but I should mention that these thoughts are my own alone.

Here’s another example of the zero-sum mentality. David Lorenzo compares the signs in two stores.

Sign one:
“Please do not touch the merchandise. If you break it, let us know because you now own it.”

Sign two:
“Please hold and enjoy the merchandise. If you break it, please let us know so that we can forgive you.”

David guesses the store with sign two has higher sales. When you play a non-zero-sum game, everybody can win.

Recently I rode my trusty bike into the office. After locking it out front, I went upstairs and had what I recall as an incredibly productive day. That’s the sort of stuff that makes me happy.

As I hopped back on my back that evening, I noticed its flat back tire. That’s the sort of stuff that makes me unhappy. It was the kind of flat that cannot get flatter. Someone let the air out of my tire.

The person who flattened my ride home is living life as a zero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, one player’s loss is the other’s gain. In order for me to get +5, someone else must get -5. Add together our scores and we collectively have zero.

Life is not a zero-sum game. Doesn’t the Golden Rule basically discouraging zero-sum thinking?

Months back I purchased Morton D. Davis’ book Game Theory. As I read the early chapters on zero-sum games it seemed pretty simplistic and at some point I lost interest. A few nights ago, I was searching for a book among my many half-reads and ran across it. This time I skipped directly to the section on non-zero-sum games and I’m intrigued.

Non-zero-sum games say we both can have +5. Of course, the point is still to win, but we do so by maximizing our own advantage. Since everybody is trying to do this, succeeding in a non-zero-sum game requires comprimise and rarely means maximizing the losses of our opponent.

The prisoner’s dilemma provides a good example of how this could look in real life, at least if you hang around the wrong people (or go letting the air out of people’s tires).

I’m working on using WordPress, a great piece of open source blog software, to run a community site that allows users to register and post stories. While this is similar to a blog, it’s outside the standard single-author publishing paradigm. WordPress, it turns out, can be easily configured to do exactly what I want. I appreciate WordPress’s flexability.

Yet, as a programmer who thinks Simplicity Rules, I can’t help but be taken in by the arguments against endless preferences. Jeff Atwood has a long rant about customization that ends in three great reasons for “intentionally choosing to make things not configurable:”

1. It forces you to carefully select good default values
2. It forces you to pick a strategy and run with it rather than hedging your bets and trying to satisfy everyone
3. It’s one less thing for the user to think about when using your software

The extremely minimalist Jason Fried says to get real and get rid of preferences because of exponential permutations:

“when you start combining this preference with that preference your customers will quickly end up seeing a screen you’ve probably never seen.”

As a programmer, I’ll continue to heed their advice and keep things simple. But as a user, I can’t help but be appreciative when a highly configurable piece of software is done right.