Crown Hall By Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Let me preface this by saying I want the next touchscreen phone, camera, video player, Swiss-army knife as much as the next guy (maybe more, I don’t like the one I have). But for the past I don’t know how long, simplicity has been a rallying cry expertly advocated by John Maeda in his book  The Laws of Simplicity. These rules are embodied in numerous web apps 37 Signals wonderful Basecamp, Twitter, Flickr, and thousands of others. They intentionally limit the offerings of the program, instead continually evolving and improving their chosen set of features. So far this ethos clearly hasn’t moved into the featuritis driven desktop software market, I’m looking at you Adobe.

I think it’s safe to say that the old Mies Van Der Rohe truism “less is more” has never really applied to technology products. Much like in software the common competitive strategy has been adding more features to an existing product to one-up your competitors. But if you look around there seems to be some hints at change in places like the netbook world. For the unacquainted netbooks are less powerful smaller laptops, not because they are the low-end cheap versions of their more powerful cousins, but because they have a different utility. The mode of thought that produced the netbook said that the majority of laptop users only need a word processor/spreadsheet application, a browser for the internet and sometimes an email client. So what is important is internet access, portability and battery life, not processor power. The major front runners compete on these basic attributes. Simple. Along the same lines is the the Kindle (although is a back light too much to ask) and other book readers which focus on doing a better job of allowing you to read. Most recently is the Canon PowerShot G11 which unlike competitors, forgoes megapixel count for improving image quality.

Of course it makes sense for some products to do everything ion the world I like my phone being an Mp3 player and a camera it’s less to carry around with me. Then again perhaps a phone is no longer a phone, but a completely new device with a new feature set? I think the take away is, do what you do well and don’t offer additional features unless they are in themselves a full solution. I know that at the end of the day I prefer my eReader to be a better book, and I prefer my software to do a good job of what I purchased it for. I wouldn’t use a hammer instead of a saw to cut a piece of wood even though it’s capable.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 9:08 am and is tagged with , Design, Technology, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.