Uproot

Photo courtesy of Red Dot

The stars aligned last Thursday night and the entire most of the Uproot crew (sorry Chris) were able leave the studio in time to attend Dan Saffer’s lecture at OCAD. Dan is a highly respected author and Principal of Interaction Design at Kicker Studio in San Francisco.

Dan’s talk, The Complexity of Simplicity in Design, was focused on how to achieve simplicity in design. There are few user experience practitioners that don’t strive for simplicity but, as Dan pointed out, it isn’t easy to achieve.

A 2006 quote from Steve Jobs, referred to in Dan’s slides, summarises the talk very well:

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

Running up that hill

If you imagine the first solutions Jobs referred to as a the top of a hill, then according to Saffer, getting up that hill involves tackling eight things that lead to complicated solutions.

1. Features: More features, more complexity. Naturally.
2. Versions: As products evolve, it’s natural to add more features. (See No. 1)
3. Context: Trying to address too many environments for your product
4. Users: Trying to address too many user groups, instead of focusing on key personas (part of our process here at Uproot).
5. Stakeholders: Too many people invested in owning a piece of the product. Saffer recommended using design principles (another key part of our process) to vet stakeholder requests.
6. Activity: Getting the balance of user control and system automation wrong. A hilarious post from DamnYouAutoCorrect.com drove home this point.
7. Constraints: Constraints can be a good thing, but like all things, in moderation.
8. Edge Cases: Last but not least. Along with stakeholder request, this is often the barrier to success for most of our projects. The desire to consider all cases, especially among software engineers, often results in a product tripping over itself (*cough* Android).

The view from the top

Once you’ve made it through these hurdles, successfully or unsuccessfully, you’ll end up with a solution. As Dan and Steve pointed out, it’s usually not the right one; It’s the one that finally works, that makes the deadline or just has to ship. This is what Jobs refers to when he mentions the “time” and “energy” needed to get to the simple solution. Of course this is the toughest pill to swallow, as many questioners stated following the talk, due to client and project restraints.

Descending to Simplicity

What drove home the lecture for us was Dan’s clear guidelines on how to refine your solution to a better (or the best) version of itself. We feel, the guidelines can help UX practitioners not only build a truly simple product but work with stakeholders to plan for the effort required to do so.

A few excerpts:

• Remove: Ask if something has to be in for launch. Remove the items where the effort-to-build vs value-to-customer ratio just don’t make sense.
• Mental models: Make sure you’re considering expected behaviours and mapping those defined functionality
• Hiding: Dan talked about “staged disclosure”, something Bang & Olufsen pioneered in home appliances. Hide what’s un-needed for primary task, include cues for users to find them when necessary
• Organizing: Key points on ensuring your groups don’t out-number your items, removing visual clutter and building and refining based on learned interactions.

Final Thoughts

Other key takeaways included using shortcuts, distributing features across platforms and contexts and being logically inconsistent at times to address primary use cases.

Of course, we can’t do the whole presentation justice. We strongly suggest attending Dan Saffer’s talks to get some great insight on designing and building interactive products.

Thanks to Dan’s talk, a handful of talented designers and decision makers now have a guide on how to push through that critical moment in most design processes and end up at with a product that elicits the coveted “Oh, of course” reaction we should be striving for in our solutions.

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