Simplicity takes balls (by rodp)

rodp:

iPhone only has one button. One. How many other mobile phones have one button? How about Google search? It’s pretty much a single text box. Its homepage isn’t cluttered with news, banners and category links. Are you impressed with 37signals’ success story? A company of less than 10 people builds the world’s most popular project management tool. How do you figure they made it? Certainly not by putting a Gantt chart in it.

Throughout my career, I’ve been working with clients that are as impressed as I am by products such as iPhone, Google or Basecamp. However, when it comes to achieving simplicity in their own products, the vast majority of them falls short. Some of them miss the point by miles, usually thinking that a glossy design is all they need to have a great product. Some of them, however, understand that truly great products are the ones that lack features, rather than have them. Nevertheless, they, too, eventually tend to clutter their products with every feature imaginable.

I don’t blame them, though. Adding a feature is only a question of time and money. Removing a feature takes courage. Excuse my Serbian, but deciding what feature your users can live without takes balls of steel.

I’ve seen this so many times. At the start of a project we’re looking at Apple or Google or 37signals for inspiration. However, down the road, when we’re put in front of a choice of having or not having a certain feature - we get scared. Suddenly, keeping that feature feels more comfortable than letting it go.

Is a small, boring, textual link enough or do we need a big, colorful, teaser image? Should we hide it by default or do we show it just in case our users overlook it? There are people who get scared and chicken out once presented with questions like this. And then there are Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jason Fried, …