As my own small contribution to the literature on featuritis, here’s a personal illustration. My mobile phone isn’t anything fancy. It’s cheap and very basic by today’s standards. No internet, no camera, no MP3 player. I bought it because all I wanted to do was to make calls and send texts.
So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.
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Context
You want to collect the dates of birth of a group of people so that you can analyse and segment the group by age, but asking for a date of birth isn’t necessary for any specific reason and many people in the group may balk at giving you this private information.
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First came the guerilla gardeners, sowing seeds and planting plants in public places without permission.
Then there were the guerilla benchers, installing street seats where the local authority had been too poor or too mean to do it themselves.
On the web, a growing community of civic hackers has been building sites on top of public information to mash it up in new ways that the publishers hadn’t imagined or didn’t have the means or motive to build.
Getting to Less is all about helping designers decide what to keep and what to throw out of their designs. Whether you’re designing software, websites, products or cities, you need to choose what to include and what to omit. But how?
Simplicity is becoming an increasingly important trend in design. As life becomes faster-paced and we’re deluged with more choices, more information and more stuff, users and consumers are demanding that designers do the heavy lifting of making things more focussed, easier to learn, more refined.
The question for designers is “How?” How do we know when something is just right, and when it’s too much or not enough? How do we separate the essential from the peripheral? When do we stop?