Why I love simple design
The answer is ironically simple. Ease of use. Web sites should not be an easter egg hunt. Nor should websites be a novel. There are kindles for that. Any web site I go to I should be able to immediately answer 2 questions off the bat:
1. What is it?
2. How do I do it?
One site that captures this quite well is Vimeo.com. Upon entering the site it is clear that it is a web site for sharing videos. And to get started the have a nice big green button labeled “Sign up for Vimeo”. Besides the fact that big green buttons are awesome (Who doesn’t like clicking big green buttons?), it is very clear and easy to see the “How”.
Now to be completely counter-intuitive, simple design is hard. Widdling down a whole list of requirements and coming up with a design that works for all parties is not easy and often times results in a design built upon the result of many compromises over many a lengthly battles between designers, developers and other project stake holders. Same ol’ story, right? Yup and it sucks. I’m not going to delve into that subject as it is outside the scope of my post and i’m trying to keep things simple. ;]
So, next time you do a design or land on a new web site, see how long it takes you to answer the “What?” and the “How?”. Ask other people to look at it too. See if they get it and how long it takes them. If they don’t get it or it takes them 5-10 seconds to figure it out, you may want to take another look at your design.
.matti
