ON SIMPLICITY IN PRODUCT DESIGN
The average person makes over 35,000 decisions a day. With so many choices, the last thing users need is a product with a cluttered and confusing interface.
So, should you keep adding features to the product screens?
As the number of choices increases, so does the effort required to collect information and make good decisions. Having a feature-rich interface can make products overly complex and difficult to learn. Keeping a reasonable number of options on the screen allows people to make decisions more easily and complete tasks faster.
Cognitive load, analysis paralysis, and choice overload are just some problems users will have working with complex applications.
Simplicity can improve user experience, increase engagement, and reduce development costs. Airbnb, Apple, Dropbox, and Google are good examples of companies understanding and applying this.
Here are a few ways how you can do it too:
Use more negative space.
Progressively disclose information.
Brake things into steps.
Limit the number of choices.
Set smart default presets.
“Hide” advanced nice-to-have features.
Avoid adding features with little to no value to the user.
Remove unused features.
You should experiment with different levels of simplicity in your product design, and use metrics such as user engagement and retention to determine which approaches are most effective.
Simplicity in UX
FEATURED ARTICLES
Keep It Simple
Short video on it by the legend Jakob Nielsen.
Less is more
Short video on it by NNG.
The laws of simplicity
Concepts from the book by John Maeda.
The cognitive bias of the week
CHOICE OVERLOAD
Choice overload, also known as overchoice, choice paralysis, or the paradox of choice, describes how people get overwhelmed when they are presented with a large number of options to choose from. While we tend to assume that more choice is a good thing, in many cases, research has shown that we have a harder time choosing from a larger array of options.
Featured designer
NIKOLA STOJANOVIĆ
Again a friend of ours and an awesome product designer. Over the years, he has worked in several big and small startups. At the moment, he is freelancing.
You can check him out on twitter @joxxnie or his peorsonal webiste bento.me/joxxnie. He also has a cool new website where he curates the best designs out there gomila.co, or @gomila_club on twitter.
Until the next time!
Ivan