Good article on designing for simplicity, by Rob Tannen, on Designing for Humans:
Some points I found interesting:
“Research by Accenture…found that only five percent of
returned products actually have a malfunction – in many cases, the buyer has
simply found them too complex to set up. Another study…found that the average
U.S. consumer spends only 20 minutes trying to make a device work before giving
up and returning it.”
He makes a great point about automatic improvements, using
the example of automobile transmission: the example shows how complexity of the
gear-shifting task was moved from the user (manual transmission) to the system
(automatic transmission). Technically, though, automatic transmission is much
more complex a system in its design. (In other words, design of simple
interfaces isn’t simple.)
“In other words, what the end-user wants isn’t simplicity per
se, but a simple way to access complexity.”
When we are challenged to do things like other companies
known for their simple interfaces (such as Apple), we need to remind ourselves
that it’s a lot harder to do that well.
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