John Maeda

I found this book oddly annoying. It’s quite small and I think I was hoping for something neater and more meditative. I found it conceptually quite cluttered, more in tune with a business audience than artists. A lot of it speaks to product design, I guess I was hoping for something about thinking, or art, or creativity. Hope leads to disappointment, I suppose. I’d love to see Maeda come back to this book and rewrite it, to see what he thinks now.

This short (100 page) book gives 10 laws and 3 key properties for designing simple systems. Maeda provides a hand summary of the laws and key principles:

Ten laws:

1. Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
3. Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
4. Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.
5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
6. Context: What lies in the periphery of show more simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.
8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.
9. Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
10. The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Three key principles:

1. Away: More appears like less simply by moving it far, far away.
2. Open: Openness simplifies complexity.
3. Power: Use less, gain more.

I fail to see the difference between the laws and principles (maybe Maeda just didn't want 13 laws ;), but other than that, these feel like a good set of principles to keep in mind when designing. They capture many common design dilemmas. For example, systems are often designed for expert and novice users. The "Learn" principle can be used to frame this dilemma. A novice user has no knowledge about your system; an expert user has that knowledge. The system should provide necessary knowledge to the user while not getting in the way of the expert. By reducing the knowledge needed (law 1), possibly by relying on knowledge the user already has (law 4) this dual nature may be achievable. There may still be problems because some complexity is inherent in trying to cater to two user groups (law 9).

The Laws of Simplicity rings true. It is consistent with what I have read of Don Norman's work and with a good deal of what I remember from Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface. It is also consistent with what I learned in HCI and my own experience.

One nitpick: the book tried to hard to push the associated website. Once at the end would have been enough. I can forgive it that quirk since it was, in general quite spiffy (and shiny, literally; the cover had pretty shiny bits). show less

I definitely enjoyed this little book and recommend it. It is more of a short meditation on simplicity in technology and life than any kind of manual, but it is a good, rich little essay on this topic.

Some of the highlights of this book include:
* Removing and hiding features are counterbalanced by the need to make their quality tangible (including aerodynamic or streamlined design), in an act of emotional design.
* Melting elements into a blur can make them appear more simple in the show more gestalt, although there is a price to this in the learning curve.
* Put yourself in the shoes of the beginner to teach and learn the basics, repeating yourself.
* "Metaphors are only deeply engaging if they surprise along some unexpected, positive dimension."
* "Simplicity and complexity need each other": "find the right balance where you can become 'comfortably lost.'"
* "The taste of this meal is affected by the [pure white] room we sit in."
* And trust resides in how much you need to know about a system and how much the system knows about you.

The acronyms and so forth that show up through the book are fairly hokey, but he admits this as an unresolved flaw and reminds us of several important points in about 115 pages, culminating in the idea of "subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful." He also has a companion website at lawsofsimplicity.com where he occasionally posts other books, links, etc. As always, I would've liked sources for some of his anecdotes--this would be a form of his "openness simplifies complexity"--and since this is something I do not see on the website, I'm going to have to spend some time if I want to track any of them down.

Overall, this is a rich dessert. Highly recommended. show less

I thought this book was sometimes more simple-minded than truly interesting about simplicity. Perhaps it was the author's over-reliance on cute tricks like acronyms and initialisms for mnemonics.

Which is not to say that there's nothing interesting or compelling here. I like "Time: savings in time feel like simplicity," and "Away: more feels like less by simply moving it far, far away." That plus "Differences: simplicity and complexity need each other" combine for potent rules of thumb for show more web sites and counter-arguments against those who claim that simplicity necessitates "dumbing down." It's really "smartening up" and moving those smarts out of the user's face. show less