Many people talk about simpler government IT but why doesn’t it happen? It’s because keeping things simple is one of the hardest things you can do, especially in an organisation that’s not wired for that kind of thinking. This is compounded when you’re dealing with suppliers that are also kitchen-sink thinkers. In general suppliers think that they can get more business and make more money by providing more stuff. Usually they’re right because most customers see the supposed advantages more than the costs of overblown software and systems.

“What’s so hard about being simple?” could easy fill a book but there are a few common factors:

• People don’t realise that when you add something you take something away. Your increase in literal functionality gets traded off against clarity, ease of use, ease of learning and user satisfaction.
• People find it hard to make decisions. Tell your children that they can have 30 Christmas presents and they’ll happily start writing lists. Tell them that they can have only one — within reason, anything — and they’ll probably hate you forever. It’s so much easier to throw in the kitchen sink than think through what you really need.
• You can’t predict the future. Trying to anticipate hypothetical future needs is a great way to buy a ton of junk that you don’t need now and won’t ever need. But if your procurement process is lengthy and cumbersome and you’re going to have to live with a new system for several years it’s tempting to grab everything you can because you know you won’t have a chance to do it later.

For corporate IT I’d recommend:

• Start small. Purchase or build the minimum system you need to meet your current needs and build it up from there when necessary and not before.
• Choose or build modular systems that can be extended when necessary rather than having to throw out the whole system and trade up.
• Use systems that can talk to each other. Follow the Unix philosophy of systems that do one thing well and can easily be combined with other systems to produce toolchains and capabilities that are much greater than the sum of their parts.
• Streamline procurement. Build in preferences for small systems and short-term contracts. Try to make it as cheap as possible to change your mind and to trade up when future needs change rather than forcing people to stick with systems that no longer suit them.
• Hire some good developers (Hi!). Many useful small systems can be quickly and cheaply built in-house in far less time and for far less money than buying a commercial product. When that system needs a small change you can quickly and cheaply just make it rather than being at the mercy of an external supplier to do it. They could take months or they might not be interested in doing it at all.

This post started life as a comment at We Love Local Government.

A sense of lightness is what I appreciate most in the designs that I enjoy. It’s what I strive to create in my own work too.

In our increasingly frenetic world, things that let you do what you want to do with the minimum of obstruction, frustration and delay are needed more than ever. Like Don Norman’s invisible computer, this is design that all but disappears when you use it. It gets out of your way and defaults to shutting up. Its sophistication is not in trying to be smart, much less in trying to be impressive or entertaining. It’s subtle, humble and discreet, working in the service of you the user rather than trying to draw attention to itself. Most of all it is design as our servant rather than our master.

Dieter Rams says:

Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.

The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.

Lightness can be measured as value for effort. The less effort you need to expend in learning, maintaining and satisfying the product you’re using for a given amount of genuine benefit the better. If you’re flying through the things you want to do without obstruction, that’s lightness. If it feels like you’re wading through treacle, that’s not.

Lightness is an imperative. We’ve got better things to do than to perform incantations and rituals just to take care of the mundane details of everyday life. Our energies should be directed towards curing the world’s ills, being with our families and making sense of it all, not coaxing printers to print, navigating endless telephone menus and jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Life is far too short to be a slave to a system or to a machine.

Here are a few examples of things that embody lightness, to a degree at least:

Gmail was revolutionary when it first launched. Aside from a generally slick user interface, the two features that really struck me as important were a huge storage quota for your mail and effective spam filtering. Being liberated from having to worry about whether you were running out of space for your mail really changed the way that people thought about webmail. It also led to other webmail providers following suit by increasing their quotas too. Removing 99.5% of spam from your inbox was another relief. Spam is something entirely incidental to what users want from email. Gmail showed that the spam problem was a solvable one, at least at the user’s end. Gmail is light because it lets you focus on your mail rather than the things — storage space and spam — that other systems forced you to think about just to be able to do your mail.

First Direct is a phone and web-only bank. It’s open around the clock, so you never have to worry about opening hours if you want to call. First Direct’s service is so resilient that it has been continuously available since it launched in 1989. When they say they’re always open, they mean always. First Direct is light because it fits itself to the customer rather than the other way around. The customer doesn’t have to memorise or look up opening hours. Customers can get on with their lives, knowing that they can always phone their bank in any spare moment they happen to have. The idea of 24-hour service doesn’t seem so strange in the age of the Internet but First Direct were well ahead of the game with building a very different relationship with their customers than was traditional in retail banking.

Dyson’s DC35 is a rechargeable vacuum cleaner that’s optimised for mobility. Which is more convenient — plugging in your cleaner when you’re using it or plugging it in when you’re not? The DC35 is both slim and light so it’s not a burden to carry the DC35 up stairs or around the house. The lightness of the DC35 comes from its literal light weight. It’s a physical product that you use while moving, so the lighter the better. Cleaning becomes a quick and effortless job rather than a tiring chore.

In urban design, decluttering aims to remove unnecessary and obstructive street furniture from pedestrians’ paths. Decluttering advocates like Living Streets reject the idea that pedestrians can and should be funnelled around a city like vehicles in the name of safety. People like to follow their desire lines, taking the most direct route from one place to another without having to negotiate a maze of barriers, bollards, cobbles and kerbs. A decluttered street is light because it removes physical obstructions and reduces delays and pinch points, leading to a sense of freedom of movement.

A webmail service, a bank, a vacuum cleaner, a street. These aren’t the kinds of things that many people would think of as requiring very sophisticated design approaches. This isn’t stuff to write home about. Most likely they would only draw attention when they’re wrong in some way. The inbox running out of space and full of spam. The bank that’s never open when you want to call them. The vacuum cleaner that you don’t want to haul upstairs. The street that throws up obstacles in your path rather than just lets you move. This is the mundane stuff of everyday life and much of it needs a great deal of improvement.

There is hope. The big four technology companies — Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft — all embody lightness in some of their products. As most of us are plugged into at least one of these companies’ products for much of our time, this is encouraging. These aren’t niche players. If the big four get lightness right it will be hugely influential across our broader culture. There is a possibility, perhaps even a hope, that at some point we will hit a tipping point where things in the main Just Work and our focus can return to dealing with the real issues of life rather than the contrived problems of lazy and thoughtless designers and bureaucrats.

As designers, it’s the lightness of people that we should we working towards most of all. We’ll try to take the weight from your back and clear the obstacles from your path so that you can move freely wherever you want to go.

We keep hearing about the cuts. About how councils are going to have to do more with less. It seems like an impossible task, and maybe it is.

But if you work on a council website you can make a start today by simply removing all the stuff on your site that really doesn’t need to be there.

This will be both the cheapest and highest-value redesign you’ll ever do.

It will save you money on your hosting costs. Less stuff on a page means less data coming down the pipe. Lower bandwidth charges.

Your pages will load faster and you’ll be able to defer server upgrades longer.

People will be happier that their pages load more quickly.

People will be happier that they can find what they want more easily without having to wade through clutter and confusion.

You will save on development and maintenance costs. Deleted content and features cost nothing to maintain. You’ll never have to review, fix, redesign or rewrite them again.

With a bit of luck you’ll find that you don’t need a mobile website. Your current site, without the clutter, will do just fine.

And once you get into the habit, you’ll start to be a lot more discriminating about what you put on your site in the first place. The default answer is no. Anything that goes on has to fight for its place.

To get started you’ll need a structure and a strategy.

The structure is that you’ll remove one thing every day. It’s very unlikely that you’ll run out of things to delete, but worry about that “problem” when you get there.

One page.

One section.

One microsite.

One feature.

One sidebar.

One word, sentence or paragraph.

One link.

One form field.

One button.

One image.

One form.

Just something. Get rid of it.

The strategy is a little bit harder. How do you know what to delete?

The short answer is anything you can live without.

I’ve been through my own council’s website looking for examples. So far they break down into these categories, which should give you some inspiration:

Cargo Cults

A to Z navigation. Every council site has it. But what’s it for? Your site surely isn’t a phone book that needs an index. It’s probably a hold-over from the days of static sites that didn’t have a good search feature, if they had one at all. You probably had far fewer pages in those days too so the list of links on each letter page was much shorter. Sort out your search if you need to (make it prominent, fast and accurate) and drop the A to Z.

Cargo cults are things you do because other sites do them without you giving any serious consideration of the value they provide. Perhaps they’re required by some guidelines somewhere. Maybe they made sense once but not any longer. Question them. Challenge them. Think about it. Then do what you think is right as long as you can defend it.

Content

Badly written copy. Copy that’s too long. Stuff that’s too time-sensitive for you to maintain properly. Reams of instructions for things that should be simple enough to use without explanation. Fix the underlying issues if necessary, then delete them.

Feature Duplication

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Browsers and computers have got built-in features for changing the text size, adding bookmarks, displaying the time and date and managing subscriptions to content. Don’t waste your time doing things that are already done perfectly adequately elsewhere. Could your contact form be replaced with just a simple email address?

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words, several thousand bytes, quite a bit of money every year in bandwidth and a fair amount of time to source, resize, upload and review. They take up your readers’ time and attention too, often drawing their eye from the real content on a page. Imagine this page without the text headings. Now imagine it without the photos. See which one works?

So treat pictures as content rather than decoration and make every one count. If a picture isn’t high-quality and supremely relevant to the page then drop it. There should never be a rule that every web page must have a picture. Stock photos to illustrate generic concepts are nearly always unnecessary. Showing real people, places and activities at your council may well be fine, but not much else.

Forms

Every field you add reduces the chances of someone completing the form. If you don’t need to know something, don’t ask for it. You don’t need my postal address when I’m reporting some graffiti to you.

Multi-page forms are painful. They seem to go on forever and you never know what’s on the next page. They require some kind of navigation between the pages, which adds to the complication and the scope for error. Fit the whole form on one page, even if the page looks a bit long. People can scroll. You’re not designing for a bit of paper.

The one button every form needs is the Submit button, but it should probably be called Send or Save or Report It or something that makes sense in the context of the task. If you’ve got any other buttons like Reset (i.e. Delete everything I’ve just typed) ask whether you really need it.

And it’s worth asking whether the whole form is really needed at all.

So…

Getting rid of all the clutter on your website doesn’t require a great deal of design insight or technical skill. But it needs a lot of discipline. So once a day just delete something that you can live without and you’ll be working towards a faster, cheaper, simpler website with much happier users.

The long-awaited and much-hyped Apple iPad is out, receiving a fairly upbeat response in the media and a much cooler, going on hostile reaction among bloggers and commenters.

Spec-obsessed techies bemoan the lack of hardware features and the relatively modest screen resolution, processor power and storage space. But the iPad isn’t about any of those things. It’s about providing a great user experience for the things it does, not beating the competition on points.

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The Litl in conventional laptop mode and in easel mode

I have a love/hate relationship with computers. Or more properly, I love computing and hate general-purpose computers. Supposedly modern operating systems — Windows, OSX, Linux — are far too complex for the average user let alone novices. Collectively they’re responsible for wasting more human time, energy, money and ingenuity than anything in the history of civilisation. Even Facebook. A plague on all their houses.

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John Pawson’s Sackler Crossing at Kew Gardens has won the 2008 Stephen Lawrence Prize for projects under £1 million. Prize judge Marco Goldschmeid praised the design, calling it “a masterly conjuring trick playfully deceiving the eye with light and water as its props. It is one of those rare designs where less truly is more”.

The bridge takes an intentionally low profile, giving its users the impression of walking on water. Its deck is made from bands of dark granite laid in parallel like railway sleepers. The balustrade is formed from close-set disconnected bronze cantilevers worked smooth at the top. These flat fins combined with the sinuous path of the bridge create differing optical effects depending on the position of the viewer, appearing in some parts as a solid wall, in others almost transparent. The materials are designed to age gracefully through the years as they take on a patina of use.

The Crossing dignifies its setting rather than dominates it, conveying a sense of harmony, calm and beautifully measured restraint that is sadly lacking from most of our contemporary culture, not just architecture. It is in sensitive settings like these that real design skill shines: Knowing when to stop, knowing how to add without taking away.

View the video on Pawson’s site

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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