The most important time to keep things simple is when the user is on edge, when they will be most open to frustration. Design for over-communication and obviousness–hold the user’s hand.

One such time might be when you’re uninstalling some software, like I did recently with MailTags. I didn’t have a particular problem with the software. The trial had expired and I decided I didn’t want to register it. Here is the uninstall screen (I added the blue ovals):

Everything about the uninstall window points me in the direction of where I want to go. But to move forward, I am forced to click an “install” button. That’s the opposite of what I want. I’m an advanced user and that made me look at it two or three times. Imagine if I was a novice, or I was angry with the software.

There are also moments where your software may have to deliver bad news. Ikea’s stock availability often has to do just that. Unfortunately, there is a sea of text to wade through to finally get my answer, as you can see below (again, I added the blue oval):

These are fairly tame examples. What about when there are major errors, or the user enters an invalid email address? One of my favorite books, Defensive Design, discusses the topic in-depth. I’ve probably read it through four times and I’m still learning things.

And that’s the dirty little secret about hand-holding. Like everything else, it takes practice to get it right.

John Maeda wrote the Laws of Simplicity, a great little book that breaks down what it means to be simple. In March he gave this talk at the TED conference:

He boils down to the following nugget:

“Simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain.”

For more about his laws, check out my series of posts or buy the book at Amazon.

Thanks for pointing me to this, Mr. Duffy.

The folks at Trizoko pose a simple question:

Who would likelier succeed?
a) Johnny starting with a “I’ll-rock-the-world” approach.
b) Miguel, who starts with a “just-enough” approach.

Miguel, they say, has the best chance of succeeding, because “A simplicity approach exponentially increases your chances of achieving your primary goals.”

While I agree, I’d point out that this approach is popular with incrementalists. Completionists would probably freak out, and rightly so.

Launching with the bare minimum means the first impression is less than your full potential. That’s why you have to make sure that what you launch contains the core of your product. This is the first thing the incrementalist needs to focus on.

The next thing is appeasing the completionist. The core might not be enough for staunch completionists. Remind them that you can’t wait forever to get it out, and promise to work on their list once you launch.

Via Duffster, who may be a busy man, but always finds time to send me links about Simplicity.

Like them. That’s it.

As a friend recently said…

“I guess we are the crazies who don’t mind clients. I think clients are the number one complaint when it comes to design.”

They’re hardly crazy. They just know how to keep customers.

Once you like your customers, the rest falls into place. You will naturally do the things that show your appreciation, and that will come back to you.

Whatever you do, don’t follow the lead of Randal from the movie Clerks (slightly edited):

“This job would be great if it wasn’t for the… customers.”

If you’re having a hard time liking your customers, that’s probably a sign that you need to find better customers (or another field).

Do humans return better search results than computers? Yes, actual intelligence beats the artificial kind. But computers are really good at aggregating what humans have created.

There’s talk about social search being the next wave. Google already uses social search. They call it PageRank, and it’s why they are number one right now. It changed the game, and aggregated our opinions about sites in a usable way.

Social search may be the past, but it is also the future, as long as computers are still involved:

1. With the web opening up, human-filtered content will become more available to search engines. Check out the one result search query for an example.
2. Personalization is another method to filter what humans are already creating. See Greg Linden’s recent post characterizing value of personalized search. Linden wrote the first Amazon recommendation system.
3. Leveraging what my friends like might be the purest form of social search. For this to work, it’s going to take more than me sharing a single link. Sites I have liked need to help my friend without my immediate intervention. While social networks might appear best poised, it’s going to take data, so someone like del.icio.us is actually closer than Facebook, for example.

As much as some might despise game-able algorithms determining search results, that’s not going away. Even with social search, we still need the computers to do the heavy lifting.