The Laws of Simplicity – Law 1: Reduce
I’ve recently finished a great book by John Maeda titled The Laws of Simplicity. In his book, Maeda covers 10 laws of simplicity. The first law is Reduce – the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. Sounds pretty simple, right? Maeda is quick to point out, however, that you must be careful of what you remove. It’s not as easy as simply stripping things out, but instead removing what isn’t critical to the product or service.
We’ve all had experiences with a product or service, which has a battery of unnecessary features. Great products carefully balance absolute necessity with nice to haves. The iPod is a classic example. Other MP3 players existed prior to the iPod. But the iPod was arguably the first to truly get it right. Analysts and competitors criticized Apple for intentionally excluding features like a radio – the iPod had so much less, it was sure to fail. Once again, the analysts were wrong.
Once a product has been stripped of all that’s unnecessary, Maeda uses a principle, which he affectionately calls SHE – Shrink Hide Embody.
SHRINK – People are amazed by small, unassuming, powerful objects. We are more forgiving of these smaller objects when they misbehave. Additionally, smaller objects are less intimidating than larger ones. Maeda uses the comparative illustration of a spoon and a bulldozer. Both serve the same primary purpose – to scoop and move materials. A spoon is much easier to operate than a bulldozer. And if a spoon falls on you, well, your day pretty much continues status quo. A bulldozer on the other hand, well, that would be a very bad day.
HIDE – Hide complexity. Apple hides the terminal application in the Utilities folder. It’s a great way to keep those of us who shouldn’t be messing around with the guts of our computers from messing them up. Maeda uses the example of a Swiss army knife – you can expose the tool you’re using, while hiding the others. This method is something I refer to as the onion-skinning approach. With the onion-skinning approach, rather than expose all the complexity of a system, we only reveal what is appropriate one layer at a time.
EMBODY – Embrace quality over quantity. One of the many reasons Apple, Tiffany’s, Mercedes, and others can charge a premium for their less feature laden products is quality. It’s important to point out that quality can be either actual or perceived. Did you know that Ferraris have few parts than most cars, but that the parts are of much higher quality? The same can be said for Glock. I was once told by a sportsman that Glock had done test burying their handguns in the mud, left them for 10 years, then dug them up, cocked and fired them without incident. Now that’s quality control.
Perceived quality is often accomplished through clever marketing, like the use of a famous athlete or model. We can see examples of this from Nike with Tiger Woods and Michael Jordon, as well as Victoria’s Secret’s use of Super Models.
Maeda sums up the chapter on Reduce with:
Less what you can and conceal everything else without losing the sense of inherent value. EMBODY-ing a greater sense of quality through enhanced materials and other messaging cues is important subtle counterbalance to SHRINK-ing and HIDE-ing the directly understood aspects of a product. Design, technology, and business work in concert to realize the final decisions that will lead to how much reduction in the product is tolerable, and how much quality it will embody in spite of its reduced state of being. Small is better when SHE’d.