Everybody wants simple but then asks for more features

6 Comments

1. Simple is BIG.

2. yeah … just exchange the word simple for cheap and you get the true meaning of “i would like you to design a simple website with ecommerce and content management” … i get this type of enquiry 90% of the time

3. Chris, you must read this article The Beauty of Simplicity. It’s probably the best article I read last year!

   Some great quotes from it:

   “blame a competitive landscape in which piling on new features is the easiest way to differentiate products, even if it makes them harder to use; blame marketers who haven’t figured out a way to make “ease of use” sound hip. “It’s easier,” says Charles Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research, “to market technology than ease of use.””

   “In the past, he says, adding features usually meant adding costs. Put a sound system or power windows into a car, and you’ve upped the price, so you better make sure consumers really want what you’re peddling. But in the digital world, that cost-benefit calculus has gone awry. “The incremental cost to add 10 features instead of one feature is just nothing,” says Oppenheimer. “Technology is this huge blessing because we can do anything with it, and this huge curse because we can do anything with it.””

   It’s a long article so just print it and read it later, worth every minute, IMO.

4. Simple is intuitive
   Simple thinks two steps ahead for you
   Simple doesn’t sacrifice function for the sake of form

5. Simple is for the brain-dead 😛

6. I must say, I love the comment of:

   “Simple thinks two steps ahead for you”

   It’s so true. Simple doesn’t mean the work and thought put into it is simple – more often than not it’s a lot more effort and time.

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