Tag: simplicity

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A complicated interface is fixable

According to usability industry leader Jakob Nielsen, usability failures in software and apps are usually because the software:

  • solves the wrong problem.
  • has the wrong functions for the right problem.
  • makes the right functions too complicated to understand.

Nielsen’s last point reminds me of what a product manager once told me: many users of highly specialised software think of themselves as experts, but only few of them actually are. He believed elaborate sets of functions are too numerous or complex to learn fully. As user researchers and interface designers we can help solve that.
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Functional sophistication, not complexity

Some software companies add ever more features to their software as a way to differentiate it from its competitors. Lucinio Santos’ lengthy analysis of sophistication versus complexity includes this graphic:

functional-sophistication-not-complexity

An excellent example of simplification is the Microsoft Office ribbon. Many users who upgrade dislike the ribbon for months because of the sheer amount of GUI change it imposes, but the ribbon successfully simplifies and makes existing features more discoverable.

Incidentally, the Office ribbon was designed by a design team using generative design. I facilitated a ribbon-design project that used a team of developers Five Sketches™—a method that incorporates a generative design.