The Attraction of Simplicity

Make it look easy.

Ground Swell by Edward Hopper, 1939 (public domain - Wikimedia Commons, CC0 by 1.0)

“As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.” — François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 1665

You’ve probably heard an older relative yearn for the past. Maybe they see rising prices or the uncaring way customers are treated.

Then they get a far-off look in their eyes and wistfully sigh, “Things sure aren't the way they used to be.”

Of course they’re not. Bread doesn’t cost a nickel. A movie isn’t 10 cents. And your banker doesn’t know you by name.

It’s human nature to want to return to what we knew. The comfortable. The familiar. It feels like home.

But as Nick Carroway told Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past.” The past is just that. It occupies an important but distant place in our minds.

Which is why it’s so powerful when we get a glimpse of the way things used to be in the context of a business setting today.

Amid the flurry of notifications and emails, two-factor authentications and e-commerce, Apple Pay and Amazon, the old-fashioned seems quaint and comforting.

Like going home.

The Power of Simplicity

There’s great power in simplicity.

Boiling down a complex problem to its core. Making a user experience that’s intuitive. Using language people can understand without pulling out a dictionary.

Can you get people to give you essential information by filling out just one form, or as few fields as possible?

Is your experience designed so someone can complete an action on their phone with just one thumb?

These are examples of simplicity in action.

We’ve got a temptation to make things more complex than simple. Part of it is a self-preservation mechanism: like academics who use unnecessarily flowery language in peer-reviewed journals, it’s a matter of elevating ourselves to seem smarter and “own” the topic.

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Eschew Obfuscation

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But the avoidance of simplicity is also an indicator of shortcuts. It takes more effort to produce something simple, whether it’s a user interface or a speech.