I’m the guy working on the simplicity workstream.

So, I thought I would try and kick off an ongoing conversation about application simplicity on the Gartner Blogger Network by disagreeing with a giant on the topic of design, Don Norman (author of books such as The Design of Everday Things, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, and The Design of Future Things).

I hate to do this but I have no choice! Because while I’m saying that simplicity is absolutely essential in the way we plan and construct applications, Norman is on record saying that simplicity is overrated. Specifically, he says:

Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?

Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.

He goes on to make the point:

Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity

The essence of Norman’s initial point is perfectly valid – people want features. But in reality they only want features that make a product do what they want it to do. They’re not interested in the features needed to get the product to do things that other people want it to do.

But Norman presents a false dichotomy – it’s either features or simplicity. Inherent in this position is a view that simplicity’s primary characteristic is the absence of features. In fact the defining characteristic of simplicity is the relevance of features. An increase in features is not mutually exclusive with simplicity. It is only when the next additional feature has no particular value to the majority of it’s intended audience that you enter into the world of confusing products.

Simplicity’s biggest obstacle is not fickle customers. It’s lazy design. It’s really hard to craft product segments based on the careful observation of people, the challenges they face and the varying different capacities they have using a product. So product developers don’t bother. They either throw every conceivable feature into a product and let a user interface designer, or the customer, figure it out. Or they segment features based on marketing-crafted product bands which are created not with people in mind but on margin maximization.

So, is it true that when given a choice people will take the item that does more? That, of course, depends on how the choice is being framed.

In his article, Norman highlights a specific example of a Siemens washing machine which was purposely designed with more controls and buttons even though the machine could effectively automate most everything itself. According to Siemens usability expert, automation was akin to a loss of control (how uniquely German). But Norman goes on to make the following observation:

Would you pay more money for a washing machine with less controls? In the abstract, maybe. At the store? Probably not.

That is not a question about the value of simplicity. That is a question of justifying a company’s banding strategy. If your goal is to get a customer to pay $2000 for a washing machine then yes, I guess I can understand the desire to add some fancy doohickies.

Of course, this example obviously misses the alternative most people would prefer to be presented with – is there a lower-priced option that only does the stuff I need it to do. What is that right mix of price vs. features? Ah, there’s the hard work. But banding is the easy way out. And if a low-end product exists only to capture customers not prepared to pay for the premium product then chances are it won’t be successful. And chances are that a bunch of marketing types will be saying to each other, “see, people want more stuff – we made it simple and they didn’t buy.”

But if the work is done to understand the customer and what they need then you get a different result. Just consider something like the Flip Video Camera. Here we have a product, designed to simplify video by removing features superfluous to the requirements of many people while being offered at a much lower price. The result – a highly successful product which is now being copied by competitors.

Where Norman and I agree is in the importance of design. But most technologists see design as being an aesthetic and structural activity. That all we need to do to tackle complexity is to re-order, re-package and re-present a growing list of features.

But what I’m asserting is that complexity will never be tackled, nor simplicity achieved, without a central focus on conceptual design. The central question of design is not how a product does something but why it does it in the first place. And that question can only be answered with an intimate understanding of the people we’re designing for. If we get conceptual design right than what naturally falls out is the realization that every product has an inherent functional vanishing point. Identifying that is the essence of simplicity.

Make no mistake – simplicity is not overrated. It is critical. And while I’ve been looking at the consumer product space in this blog, the lessons here are as relevant to the enterprise IT organization and the technology they manage. Simplicity equals relevance. And IT organizations that continue to ignore this will find that they will have a growing relevance problem with their users.

I have been somewhat amused at the extent to which the digital intelligentsia are trying to assess the iPad by deconstructing it’s feature set. The logic is clear – the more things the iPad (or any product for that matter) does the more people it will appeal to. Therefore, for every missing feature one must subtract a segment of its potential audience in order to determine its total market appeal. This thinking is most humorously conveyed by the deep disappointment Adolf Hitler felt on learning what wasn’t included in the iPad.

This logic, however, is flawed. I am convinced that Apple went the other direction. They found a target audience and determined what features were necessary to meet their minimum expectations. Who is this audience? It’s the vast sea of humanity that sees the computer as merely an appliance. And appliance computing nowadays boils down to four categories; 1) creating simple documents, 2) storing and accessing digital content, 3) exploring the internet and, 4) interacting with friends and family. As an appliance, the iPad is a near perfect fit. It does what the Mac family shouldn’t and the iPod family can’t.

There’s a lot of different people that fall into this category. It could be the student that does a little word processing for homework, a bunch of research on the internet and a whole lot gaming. Maybe it’s the retired guy who keeps up with former colleagues and stores his grandkids school photos. Maybe its the stay-at-home mom who coordinates her children’s activities, does some online shopping and stays on top of family health issues. But what so many of these people share is a fatigue with computing devices that force them to navigate a sea of superfluous functionality to achieve their modest objectives. Computing devices designed by the digital intelligentsia for the digital intelligentsia.

In this regard I don’t see the iPad as a tablet – whatever the heck that is. I consider it a technically-sophisticated anti-technologist statement. It is designed to debunk the conventional wisdom that the only way to find a common intersection between the diverse needs of different human beings is to build products with as many doohickies and thingamabobs as possible.

If the iPad turns out to be the success that Gartner, and others, are predicting then this will largely be a testament to the power of design thinking and Apple’s commitment to it. Design thinking doesn’t concern itself with the reaction of the deconstructionists. In fact, I think the iPad brand will only get stronger the more the technologists reject it for lack of this feature or that.

The most compelling aspect of the iPad, in my mind, is its restraint.

And that’s a concept that I sincerely hope many more participants in the IT industry will grok onto sometime soon.

We’ve heard it often and many of us are probably aware of it’s historic connection with the Bauhaus movement of the early through mid-20th century.

One of the key perspectives of the Bauhaus movement was a rejection of the superficial ornamentation so commonly found in the arts, crafts and architecture of the 19th century. In its place emerged streamlined, minimalist design forms meant to capture the essence of an objects purpose.

But what happens when functionality becomes superficial ornamentation? By extension, form must also ultimately fail.That is exactly the dilemma facing the software industry.

Conventional wisdom states that the value of software is correlated to requirements and users. That equation is linear – the more features the more potential users, the more potential users the more value. This “total is greater than sum of its parts” perspective is pervasive in the software engineering community and even amongst many designers. However, this view is self-referential – it sees the value of software through software.

But what we’re increasingly understanding is that for users, software is merely a conduit. Their focus has always been squarely on its purpose. However, as a software solution evolves to meet as many users “requirements” as possible, it actually ends up obfuscating value to its constituents rather than increasing it. This is my point. For the end user, every additional capability beyond what serves their direct purpose is superfluous ornamentation.

In the true spirit of the Bauhaus, users are clearly seeking ways to rid themselves of this ornamentation. That message is largely lost on those responsible for creating these solutions for them.

Form following function worked for Walter Gropius but it won’t be good enough for the software industry. We need a movement that re-engages us with the concept of purpose. Purpose which has clear human dimension. Purpose whose distinctions are deemed as important as its definition. Purpose which serves to actively engage its user spurring creative applications unimagined by its designer.

When function follows clear purpose, form can follow function.

Just last year, as I was starting to use the MP3 feature of my phone, Apple made me realize I could use the phone feature of my MP3 player. Of course, I’ve been known to listen to music on my GPS device while I’m using the GPS capabilities on my phone to get directions. I just bought a micro-projector but I also plan on falling back on my phone’s micro micro-projector. My projection TV has a web browser even though I often watch TV from my browser. And if I still can’t figure out what else I can do with all the different devices at my disposal there’s a thousand other ideas in an App Store just a couple of gestures away.

That’s the beauty of technology – there’s no device, no software, no web site or service that can’t be improved with a little pimping up. Right?

But just yesterday, I was observing a gentleman on my train home doing his email from his laptop PC, while listening to his iPod. He had to stop to take a call, which he did, on his MP3-enabled Blackberry. When I got home I was standing in my kitchen, pondering this man’s flagrant affront to the benefits of convergence, when I couldn’t help but notice my surroundings.

Something sparked!

I dashed out of the kitchen and ran to my entertainment room upstairs. I turned on my TV, swapped the input settings and powered up our Nintendo Wii. A few waves and clicks and I had launched the inbuilt browser connected to my home’s wireless network which I have set up in my PC room right next to the kitchen. I jumped into YouTube and found the following video:

Now I love these quaint insights into the way we once thought of consumer technology. And it’s nice to think of a time when a woman could find gainful employment as a model without being an anorexic 17-year old. But what struck me is that 50 years ago there was something disturbingly modern in the way technology was being designed to better our lives. Notice how kitchen design was based on an assumption of functional convergence navigated via easy push-button interfaces?

Back to my kitchen I went and then it hit me. After half a century of technology and industrial design innovation what do I have in my kitchen? A refrigerator, a stove, an oven, a toaster, a coffee machine, a dishwasher, and the legacy of years of unwanted, but graciously received Mother’s Day gifts – an entire cupboard dedicated to a salad spinner, a juicer, two different food processors and a George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Machine.

As well intentioned as mid 20th century device manufacturers were, it turned out there was never a market for a single and coordinated environment that refrigerates, grills, fries, slices, dices, makes julian potatoes and then cleans up after itself.

With the luxury of 20-20 hindsight maybe what is technically feasible is not necessarily desirable. The vast majority of humanity, it would seem, prefers to work with “single-purpose” technology. That is a product designed to do a thing well rather than lots of things not so well. That was certainly the case with me and my kitchen.

Could it be true? The ramifications were staggering. A few taps, twists and pulls on my iPhone’s browser and I found out that a comprehensive study of mobile phone use by AMTA/ARC in Australia found that just over 20% of mobile phone users had ever used the device to listen to music or browse the Internet. In fact, only 50% use voicemail! The Pew Internet & American Life Project from December 2007 found that only 19% of their respondents have ever used a phone or a PDA to send an email and only 8% did so on a daily basis.

The realization dawned on me. It’s not the guy on the train who didn’t get the value of technology convergence. I was the one with the problem. I’ve been assuming that the more things a piece of technology does the more powerful it is. And it’s powerful technology that’s supposed to enrich people’s lives. I bought into this vision and I’ve spending too much with other people that have done the same thing.

But the reality for most people is that the way they really want to interact with technology is the way I interact with my kitchen.

He then asked people what it would take to for them switch search engines. The results were:

Interesting? Yes! Insightful? I’m not sure. You see, over the last couple of months I’ve been informally asking our clients why they go to the search site of their choice in the first place (the vast majority of which is Google). What I’ve found is that no one can actually explain why they go to the site they go to – they just go there. It’s more of a stimulus-response behaviour than a conscious decision.

In fact, I’ve specifically asked how many people have actually compared speed or “result quality” between different search engines and found that only a tiny fraction have bothered doing so. And remember, I’m talking to highly technical IT types. These are people genetically predisposed to make technology comparisons. So while I find Khan’s survey interesting I’d question how your average person would know they’ve gotten a better search result much less be able to discern an improvement to the near instantaneous time it currently takes to receive them.

I think it’s futile focusing on why someone might switch from Google (let’s face it – that’s the main game here). It’s far more important to understand why it has become the gravitational force is has. My theory – it boils down to “location singularity.”

Consider the design of the following sites www.msn.com and www.yahoo.com. Search is represented as just one of many features. But at www.google.com search is the location’s raison d’être. Google achieved this by dedicating the vast majority of that the page’s real estate to nothing. That sends a subtle yet powerful message that the whole point of typing www.google.com into the address bar of a browser is to find something on the internet. PageRank may have initially led people to Google rather than Altavista but it’s the white space that keeps bringing them back. That position has now firmly been cemented in place by one of the world’s most successful brands.

What Google grasped earlier then their competitors was that HTML allows a function point to be represented as a discrete destination. That is in marked contrast to to the PC GUI metaphor where function points are represented as features within a broader application.

Google’s competition keeps trying to address their shortcomings by creating cooler, more streamlined site design. But they’re missing the point. The power of the web is the address, not the page. WWW.Nivana is achieved through branded locations that do one thing, and only one thing, really well. And while I think that Google stumbled upon this realization they’ve been able to sustain this advantage by formalizing internal processes to protect that advantage (which is why I would seriously doubt that their competition can simply “unclutter” their existing sites).

But I think it’s a trap to see user interfaces as the focal point of design. As I’ve been looking into the topic of design I came across an interesting distinction between conceptual and physical design:

• Conceptual design is a basic foundation that defines the structure of the solution, including the functional elements of the product, their relationships and the system behaviour.
• Physical design is a more refined level that defines the aesthetics of the solution. In contrast with conceptual design, physical design defines the success or failure of the product appeal.

The challenge facing this industry is to spend more time on conceptual rather than physical design issues. Only then will we be able to tackle the single biggest impediment to good design in IT. That is our habitual tendency to over-engineer.

IT people, in general, do a pretty good job with product requirements. We dutifully ask “users” what they want. We try to understand the benefits those requests will deliver and then determine which needs get addressed first. But at the end of the day let’s be honest – when it comes to a feature request it’s generally a matter of when, not if, it shows up in a product or project. To paraphrase Will Rogers, most IT folk haven’t meet a feature they didn’t like.

But at some point all user interfaces will break under a relentless onslaught of new features. Products become bloated. Complexity creeps in. Users feel disempowered if not openly hostile. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about command line consoles, graphical WIMP systems or web site design. The cycle keeps repeating itself. How long will it be before we find it difficult to navigate the new crop of gesture-driven interfaces?

While user interface design is important it’s essentially retrospective. It’s a way to sort out and present the things a product already does. As a result a user interface can’t act as a brake to the over-engineering which ultimately erodes its value. Therefore user interface design must also be coupled with conceptual design processes that addresses prospective functional requirements in a different way.

These types of conceptual design processes are things I’m planning on exploring through my 2009 research efforts and this blog. But I am prepared to put a stake in the ground on a few principles that I believe need to underpin any such effort:

1. It is infinitely more powerful to understand how a technology will probably, rather than possibly, be used.
2. A feature is only of value when it is required by a majority of of its current user base.
3. When complexity is exposed, design has either failed or was never considered

That got me thinking. Google has reached the pinnacle of brand consciousness. It’s not just a proper noun anymore – it’s a verb. “To google” has become a way to describe any effort in using the Internet to answer a question.

So why not turn “Apple” into a verb? Here’s my recommendation to the people over at Webster:

apple – verb: an activity intended to foster a positive emotional connection between an individual and a specific information technology device, solution or service.

Not that I want to aggrandize Apple here. In fact I’d rather turn Apple into a generic term. Kind of like aspirin is to pain relief or cola is to soft drinks. Why? Because in face of overwhelming evidence from the market on what is driving technology adoption, I don’t think having a healthy obsession over the emotional connection people have with technology is something that enterprise IT organizations can avoid any longer. Maybe creating a new verb can help cement the idea that this type of behaviour is fast becoming an imperative to any individual or organization tasked with the responsibility to deliver technology to “users.”

Still need a New Year’s resolution? How about making 2009 the year you’ll start appleing your IT organization.