This conversation would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

So here we have what is supposedly one of the world’s leading technology companies launching what it calls a “magical and revolutionary” product. And what does it do? It goes and encourages developers to build twee simulacra of physical objects. How unmagical. How unrevolutionary. How dull. Apple have seriously employed top-flight designers and developers to build digital representations of address books and books and goodness knows what else that computers are designed to get rid of. And by “get rid of” I mean “eliminate as a concept” not “replace with a digital lookalike”. Now they want everyone else to do the same. No thanks. This is 2010 not 1910.

This approach is an enormous dead end that’s wrong on so many levels and plays itself out in various ways, some quite obvious, others more subtle and insidious. In a pragmatic sense, it just doesn’t work on its own terms. Digital metaphors of physical objects are full of leaky abstractions, being both capable of things that their physical counterparts are not and (surprise!) not capable of things their physical counterparts are. No-one seriously designs these metaphors to be perfect — it’s impossible. With computers being mainstream for at least twenty years I’m wondering why anyone’s still bothering at all. The desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was a smart-ish idea compared with the alternatives in 1984. With every year that passes it gets shot through with more and more holes. And the iPad is supposedly the device that moves on from all that. It certainly has the potential as a piece of hardware, as an OS, as a platform. So why try to limit designers’ approaches to something so decidedly retrospective?

But the real problem is much worse than some of the cheesy UI elements like page curls, as excruciating as they may be. What’s wrong with this scenario?

I go to the (virtual) bookshop and browse through the (virtual) books. I find one I like and I pay real money for it. The (virtual) book gets transferred to me and placed on my (virtual) bookshelf alongside the other (virtual) books I’ve bought and that I now have to store and organise.

Hey! It’s just like the real world!

Quite. With most of its limitations, inefficiencies and exclusions comfortingly intact. Business as usual.

Page curl and page turning is a cartoon of something that’s an artifact of pagination which is a consequence of the former necessity for long-form texts to be printed and bound and distributed as such in the physical world. So are bookshops. So is the concept of owning a book. So are bookshelves and private collections of books. And yes, I notice that the age-old tradition of handing over real money for the non-exclusive opportunity to access a particular small and pre-defined chunk of content is still going strong.

Designers: You can think of better ways of doing it than this. Numerous better ways. You could get the genius lovechild of Edward Tufte and John Pawson to redesign iBook’s UI and it’d still be a bad idea. We don’t need iBook any more than we need books. We still need ideas. We still need texts. But where they start and where they end and how we represent them and how we can explore them — that’s all up for grabs. Can we do this on the iPad? Probably. Should we try? Definitely. Does Apple want us to? Frankly, probably not.

Someone mentioned beauty. Supposedly there are 80% of people that like “functional” stuff and 20% that like “beautiful” stuff. That 20% are supposedly Apple’s customers. and the rest still use slide rules, telephone directories and Windows Mobile. I’m not going to pick apart how right or wrong that may be right now. But I’ll say this:

If beauty is making digital simulacra then we need a new aesthetic. If beauty is perpetuating not just the appearances but the cruel limitations of things past, it’s time to move on. We need a digital aesthetic that’s more than skin deep. One based on possibilities and power that continue to delight us as we use our new digital tools rather than briefly amusing us when we first encounter them. And yes, given that these are new things they should look like new things too. Get the message? If you’re not experiencing Google Search on an aesthetic level you’re not paying enough attention. I’m not talking about how it looks. I’m talking about what it can do for you. We need more of that. A whole lot more. In the short term, it’s about companies paying their bills, thriving, profiting. In the long run it’s about the entire field of computing progressing or stagnating, not the fortunes of any particular company. It’s about having an information society rather than an information technology society. You want to have something worthy of an upgrade in 2020? Step away from those horseless carriages. Don’t look back.

In short, if you love notebooks, buy a Moleskine. If you want to be a cartoonist, go and work for Pixar. If you’re confused about which way time’s running, go cyberpunk or trawl eBay for a Newton. And if you want to make a genuinely “magical and revolutionary” break with the past on the iPad platform — and I think you should — then forget about physicality and virtuality and retro computing and go and make something that not only doesn’t exist in the physical world but doesn’t exist in the digital one either. After two decades of mainstream computing we’re more than ready for something genuinely digitally native. We can stand the shock of the new. I hope that someone at Apple still understands that sometimes you’ve just got to break the rules — including your own.

At the time, there was any amount of commentary from the tech boosters who said that of course digital photography would supplant film soon enough. Meanwhile the naysayers trotted out a list of reasons why they wouldn’t be trading in their “real” cameras for these second-class substitutes and couldn’t see why anyone would.

I don’t need to tell you how that one worked out, but let’s look at the process by which this happened.

Mass-market consumer digital cameras started with the Casio QV-10 in 1995. With a resolution of a quarter of a megapixel (0.25MP) combined with pathetic image processing it was clearly a pale precursor to the intelligent and vivid cameras we enjoy fifteen years later. Yet it was essentially a modern digital camera: A (large) pocket-sized device producing colour pictures, with internal memory, a colour screen on the back and the ability to transfer pictures to a computer. The digital camera technology of today may be better but it isn’t fundamentally different.

In this first stage, the mass market and many pundits view the new technology as a loser. It’s both far more expensive and has far worse quality and usability than the thing it’s supposed to replace. This is the “birth” phase of a technology, where the early adopters spend a fortune to get something that’s massively compromised, yet shows promise and provides a fair amount of exclusivity.

I got my first digital camera in 2000, five years after the QV-10. It was a Fuji MX-1700. Costing around £400, it produced 1.3 megapixel images and had a 3x zoom lens. There were cheaper cameras, but they had even lower resolutions, worse image processing and no zoom lens. On the upside, it was extremely pocketable and produced crisp, well-exposed pictures. On the downside, the pictures were still very low resolution and it was very slow to use, with a lag of what seemed like around a second between pressing the shutter release and the camera capturing and storing the image. Compared with most compact film cameras, it was incredibly expensive toy. Yet for these faults, it was a good replacement for much of my film photography. I could see my images immediately after they were shot and show them to other people. Having paid for the camera, each shot was effectively free. Best of all, I could transfer them to my computer and put them on my website, which was in the process of becoming a far more common way of sharing photos than making prints. For its time, and for the things I did, it was fantastic. But not everyone “got it”, or was prepared or able to spend that amount of money to replace the “perfectly good” film camera they were used to using.

This is the “growing-up” phase of a technology, where products reach a wider audience who are prepared to make some compromises in respect of older devices in return for benefits in areas which they consider to be more important to them. Often these benefits are in cost and convenience rather than quality.

Now digital cameras are ubiquitous. When we talk of “cameras” we mean “digital cameras” and tend to specify “film cameras” if we mean otherwise. Film is the preserve of retro enthusiasts and a tiny minority of professionals. Businesses based around film technology have either died or revolutionised their operations towards digital. Any discussion of “will digital replace film?” now seems anachronistic and nonsensical.

In this “mature” phase of the technology, the new technology is superior in almost every way to the old. Generally, it’s cheaper, quicker, more convenient, more flexible and has better quality. Not using it involves a large degree of compromise to get a niche benefit that the mass market simply doesn’t care about.

This is where I see ebooks and ebook readers going. Right now they’re in the “birth” stage. Often they’re more expensive, lower quality and more hassle than just buying a printed book. It’s easy to see why relatively few people bother — and why those that do are considered a little strange. To most people it makes little rational sense.

But before long — and I believe we’re just entering this phase with devices like the Kindle and particularly the iPad — we’ll be in the “growing-up” phase. There will be definite pros and cons to ebooks and printed books, but not a clear-cut overall benefit either way. Which you choose will depend on what matters most to you. Cost, convenience (of carrying, purchasing and storing), display/reading quality, the ability to share and annotate, style and image. Some (richer) students will plump for an iPad over carrying a rucksack full of half a dozen fat textbooks. Other people will stick to the venerable printed book for a variety of reasons, including simple cost.

So how long before ebooks reach their “mature” phase? Five years? Ten? Almost certainly not any longer. Whatever device you’ll use to read them (phone, tablet, laptop, something else) you’ll have anyway, so no-one will think of that as a significant cost. The ebooks themselves will be much cheaper than their paper equivalents, where those even exist. Ebook reader quality will far exceed what’s possible on the printed page, in resolution, clarity and flexibility. Annotating ebooks and sharing those notes will be far easier and more powerful than on a paper page. You can’t search a printed book in any automated way at all, yet the ways we’ll be able to search, analyse and navigate ebooks in a few years will seem incredible compared to the best search technology we have today. And while some will wax nostalgic about the heft, the texture, the smell and the patina of the traditional printed book, in most cases they simply won’t be buying new ones. “Book” will mean “ebook” in common speech, and discussions about “ebooks vs. print” and will seem as quaint as the battles between digital and film photography advocates in the mid- to late-1990s.

I’ll miss printed books in some ways but I’ll be constantly reminded that the ebooks that have replaced them will have done so because they’re in every reasonable sense better. Rapid, incremental technological advancement will turn that potential into reality.

I just hope I’ll have the time to read more, but I won’t bet on that.

Spec-obsessed techies bemoan the lack of hardware features and the relatively modest screen resolution, processor power and storage space. But the iPad isn’t about any of those things. It’s about providing a great user experience for the things it does, not beating the competition on points.

What competition, anyway? Netbooks, the Kindle and other e-book readers, smartphones and even Windows 7-based tablet computers are all aimed at different uses and audiences. Assuming Apple wants to keep selling iPhones, MacBooks and iMacs, it clearly doesn’t believe the iPad is a replacement for your phone, laptop or desktop. The iPad is in a category of its own for now.

So cutting past the “I wanted two cameras, multi-tasking, Flash and a 500GB hard drive” crowd, let’s ask the real question: Why wouldn’t you want an iPad on your coffee table?

What would be so terrible about being able to pick up a hand-held device with a lovely big screen and browse the web?

Why would such a thing be so awful if you wanted to curl up in a chair — or in bed — and watch a film or some YouTube clips?

Could you really not enjoy reading a book on such a thing?

No-one is stopping you popping your (smart) phone in your pocket when you go out. And no-one is stopping you working on a fully-featured laptop or desktop computer with all its multi-tasking, power and disk space when you want to do some serious work. The iPad is for sitting back, browsing, watching, listening. Writing the occasional email, tweet or comment. The kind of thing you probably either squint at a smartphone to do, or struggle to do with a netbook or toasty laptop and its poorly-suited trackpad.

You don’t need a full, multi-tasking OS to do any of these things. You don’t need Flash. You don’t need USB ports. And you don’t need a lot of storage, although by many sensible standards, the top 64GB model has a lot of storage — but not if you’re the kind of chap that has a computer dedicated to running BitTorrent.

No-one needs an iPad. Even at what appears to be a modest price for what it is, it’s a luxury item. While I would definitely argue that most working people and students need a computer and that many would benefit from having a smartphone, this in-between category of slick media viewer is pure indulgence. It will stand or fall not so much on what it can do, and even less on what it can do that other gadgets can’t. The user experience will be everything.

The test of the user experience isn’t on the spec sheet or in the promo photos or videos. It’s in getting into your hands (and hopefully, living room) and having a go. I’ll reserve further judgement until I get a chance to do just that, but if it’s as much of a joy to use as the iPhone and iPod Touch then it’ll definitely be finding house room and earning its keep by pure pleasure alone.

We’ll be seeing a lot more of these kinds of devices in future, from Apple and many others. Not just tablets, but a myriad of things-that-compute-that-aren’t-computers. For all its versatility, the general purpose computer and operating system is lousy to use, still feebly perpetuating the same interface and interaction design of the first Macs (and Lisas) back in the early 1980s.

Smartphones show promise, but their small screens will always limit their uses for many applications, at least until we can wire them into our goggles or optic nerves. The future is computers that are smaller, more specialised and more numerous, each of which is limited to but hopefully beautifully suited to its task. With its screen, controls, software and storage, what is a digital camera if not an elegantly-specialised computer?

If you ran a big organisation, why wouldn’t you want half a dozen iPads in the waiting area at reception?

Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.

@SutMobLib on Bing Maps Twitter Search

The utility of such a thing isn’t immediately obvious. While I don’t like to generalise or assume too much, I suspect that the vast majority of mobile library users don’t use Twitter. So far a grand total of nine  people have signed up to follow @SutMobLib and most of those are various sock puppets of mine.

@SutMobLib on Tweetie 2 "nearby search" for iPhone

Unlike most Twitter accounts that belong to real people, @SutMobLib isn’t great for conversation. It’s even less intelligent and interactive than it looks. Anyone that wants to be reminded when the library is visiting their neighbourhood would be better off just putting the relevant day in their calendar.

@SutMobLib is useful because Twitter is now more than just a social network connecting people. It’s become a platform for realtime geospatial information, where things like the mobile library can post up what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, as they’re doing it.

Experienced Twitter users know that while half the power of Twitter is following people you’re interested in and conversing with them, the other half is reading realtime searches for keywords, phrases and hashtags. Recently, Twitter enhanced the power of its search by allowing members to post up their precise geographical location with each tweet, which other members can then discover by searching around an area rather than around a hashtag or topic.

So Twitter has become a radar. Tweetie 2, a Twitter client for the iPhone, allows users to search “Nearby” based on the user’s current location and shows a map covered with plotted tweets. Web users can do something similar using Bing Maps’ Twitter Search. The popular client TweetDeck shows pop-up maps underneath geotweets.

Realtime geospatial search brings a new dimension to finding out about the world. For the first time we can pull up live information about a place, whether that’s people’s conversations and observations or the solipsistic self-reporting of things that tweet like Sutton’s mobile library. Various urban annotation and virtual graffiti projects have existed before now but Twitter brings this capability to a mass-market social network with tens of millions of members. Through reading conversations about coffee in Soho or chemo at the Royal Marsden Hospital, our awareness of the world around us just got a great deal broader.

@SutMobLib showing as a geotweet in TweetDeck

For some, that will mean discovering, spontaneously and without specifically searching for it, that a friend — or the mobile library — is around the corner and might be pleased to see us. The world around us is constantly shifting, with opportunities and hazards popping up and then disappearing again, often without leaving a trace. Now we can see those traces. Serendipity is the spice of life and it’s just got a very big helping hand. Fire up your radar.

—

Further reading on where ambient intelligence is taking us:

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground
Adam Greenfield, Everyware

Parisimonious design is when you’ve got enough, but no more. It prefers simple solutions to complex ones and conserves scarce resources wisely. We might think of these resources in economic or environmental terms and design products that are both cheap and don’t consume an excess of material or energy. We might consider the user and reject designs that squander their time, attention, energy and space.

Many bad designs offend against the principle of parsimony by being too big, too wasteful, too expensive, too complex, too high maintenance. Such designs are the metaphorical sledgehammer to crack a nut. We find ourselves thinking, “Do we really need all this just to do that?”

Two relatively new products should provide cautionary tales.

The Segway PT has been in the news lately as various parliamentarians including the peculiar Lembit Opik MP have put their slender weight behind a campaign to legalise their use on Britain’s streets. Clearly the fact that the Segway is currently illegal both on the roads and on pavements in this country must put a dampener on sales. Yet I suspect that even if some form of legalisation is eventually forthcoming, the Segway or anything much like it won’t become a significant mode of transport in urban areas.

The Segway does well in packing some seriously complex technology behind a relatively straightforward user interface, but my instinct is still that it’s overdesigned for the tasks it’s supposed to serve. Employing a £4000 electric vehicle just to be able to travel a little faster than walking or a little slower than cycling and in many cases with less range doesn’t offer enough marginal benefit to be worth the price, let alone the trouble of having to charge, insure and maintain it. As indefatigable campaigners Living Streets keep reminding us, walking two or three miles for everyday journeys is often much quicker and more pleasant than we might imagine, particularly when compared with the alternatives. We’re just not in the habit of doing it. For those that want to travel further or more quickly, a £50 bicycle beats the pants off vertical milk float technology in almost every respect bar sloth.

So whenever I see Segways now I can’t help but be reminded of simpering Mr Opik proudly standing eight inches above a group of bored journalists selling the idea that his dorkmobile stands between us and ecogeddon as if his life — and ours — depended on it. Not parsimonious, I’m afraid. Move along.

This week sees the launch of Sony’s latest ebook reader, the imaginatively-titled Sony Reader (PRS-505). The Sony competes with Amazon’s Kindle, forthcoming wizardly wonders like the Plastic Logic Reader and, well, books.

Despite — or perhaps because of — my love for good old fashioned dead tree books, I’m instinctively drawn to the idea of an ebook reader in almost equal measure to how I’m repelled by cumbersome personal transporters. Ebook readers promise to lighten our loads and cut clutter by replacing paper books with ethereal digital equivalents in much the same way that MP3 players have eliminated the need for CDs and vinyl for many. Is this parsimony?

The environmental credentials of ebook readers are hard to guess, but I’m sure they can be calculated. On the downside we have a (say) £200 device with complex electronics and a lifespan of five years, to be generous. On the upside, we have the lack of dozens or hundreds of paper books per device, their storage, transport and ultimate disposal. If the device really does provide an adequate substitute for paper books, I could be persuaded that it has environmental and space-saving benefits.

But there’s the rub. As the designers of the original Palm Pilot found, competing against the speed, flexibility and cheapness of paper is tough. Moleskines are the new PDAs. In The Myth of the Paperless Office, Sellen and Harper offer a compelling explanation of the obvious: Digital technology has increased rather than decreased the amount of paper in use and this trend looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. The things that paper does well, computers do not. Further, computers have stimulated and expanded the various kinds of knowledge work in which paper is an essential tool.

So are ebook readers parsimonious? Could they be? At the current state of technology, ebook readers are adequate for linear reading but very little else. If you’re addicted to airport novels they could be right up your street. But the complex browsing, cross-referencing and annotation that is commonplace with professional and academic reading is way beyond current ebook readers’ capabilities. Moreover, it’s usual for students and professionals to refer to several books and documents at once, implying that for this kind of use, the ebook reader is competing not just against one simultaneous book but several. It’s no consolation that your ebook reader may have the capacity to store 6000 copies of War and Peace when what you really want to do is to refer to all of Tolstoy’s works at once. If £200 for an ebook reader sounds reasonable, try budgeting for a dozen of them.

While ebook reader technology will presumably evolve to incorporate more of the characteristics of paper and thereby gain paper’s flexibility and affordability, right now the most parsimonious way to use large chunks of text is to print them on paper and bind them into attractive and durable covers. You can’t compete with tree.

The Segway and ebook readers condemn themselves to whimsical or niche uses by flagrantly ignoring the parsimony principle. Between two designs for the same purposes, the simpler one is the better one.

So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.

Features that I have:

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. choice of ring tones
6. profiles (stored sets of settings)
7. headset jack
8. torch
9. welcome note (customisable message when you switch on)
10. call diversion
11. automatic redialling
12. speed dialling
13. clock
14. alarms
15. reminders
16. games
17. calculator
18. stopwatch
19. countdown timer
20. ringtone composer
21. screensaver

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. clock

You want to collect the dates of birth of a group of people so that you can analyse and segment the group by age, but asking for a date of birth isn’t necessary for any specific reason and many people in the group may balk at giving you this private information.

Discussion

It’s a common conceit among people designing forms and surveys that if you ask a question, you’ll get a useful answer, but when it comes to personal information the wise designer treads very carefully.

A general rule for form design is that every extra question reduces your response rate and diminishes the chances of the form being completed accurately. Every time you add something you take something away.

As people become more conscious of the real or imagined incidence of identity theft and the predations of overzealous marketers, they are increasingly reluctant to part with personal information even where they might otherwise be happy to provide information for a purpose with which they agree.

As consumers, we understand that there are times when our date of birth will be required for official purposes. We don’t expect to be able to open a bank account or obtain a passport without it. But when we’re completing a marketing survey or simply registering with an online shop it can often feel like too much information. I don’t get asked my date of birth when I shop on the high street — why would I need to disclose it just to use the online equivalent?

Having age information about a group of people is often useful or even necessary for researchers and marketers. They might want to produce an age breakdown of a group of people using their service or participating in their research, or validate that people in a group qualify to be there where there is an age restriction.

One solution to the problem is to ask respondents for their age group rather than their date of birth:

How old are you?

• under 18
• 18-25
• 26-39
• 40-49
• 50-64
• 65 and over

This is less intrusive for respondents and more likely to gain a response than asking for a date of birth. It allows a report to be produced grouping the respondents by frequency under these headings.

Unfortunately, this approach is very inflexible. Once the respondents are placed into these groups you cannot produce a different age segmentation. In the above example, if there were a subsequent requirement to count all the people aged under 30, you couldn’t.

This approach also fails if the data are to be used over time. The age segmentations will be correct at the time of data collection but will rapidly obsolesce after that. It works for a one-time snapshot such as a survey but doesn’t work for a group who will be participating over time such as members of an organisation or customers of a business.

Resolution

These issues can often be better resolved by asking respondents for their ages and then calculating an estimated date of birth for them which is then stored. Ages are less specific than precise dates of birth and asking for them is more likely to gain an accurate response.

How old are you? _____________ (write in your age; leave it blank if you’d rather not say)

If a person responds that they are 30 today, we cannot possibly know their birthday. It could be any day between today (they’ve just turned 30) up to a year’s time less a day.

So calulate the estimated date of birth to be:

today – respondent’s age in years – six months

While there is only a 1 in 365 (ish) chance of estimating the date of birth correctly for each individual, by assuming that each person is half way towards their next birthday you prevent skewing the overall age breakdown for the group either too low or too high.

Ensure that your database or spreadsheet column is called estimated date of birth to prevent subsequent users assuming that these DOBs are accurate.

Using these estimated dates of birth you can produce sufficiently accurate age segmentations at any time in the future regardless of how you define the segment boundaries.

As a caveat, be aware that while this technique allows you to estimate the number of people in the group, say, under 30, if there’s an absolutely specific reason to find the actual members that are under 30, you can’t. You’ll get a few false positives that you’re estimating to be under 30 even though they’ve already reached their 30th birthdays.

Then there were the guerilla benchers, installing street seats where the local authority had been too poor or too mean to do it themselves.

On the web, a growing community of civic hackers has been building sites on top of public information to mash it up in new ways that the publishers hadn’t imagined or didn’t have the means or motive to build.

In digital and physical space, if something can be hacked it will be. People are no longer content to live with what designers give them. As Stewart Brand argues in How Buildings Learn, the end of the formal, official design process isn’t the end of design, it’s just the start of the informal process where the users take over and adapt their spaces to their ever-changing needs.

Within the design profession, the practice of co-design is acknowledging that products are better when the users aren’t just consulted but actually participate in the design process. But this is only half the story. Design is part observation and part clairvoyance, discerning likely future needs from current and past ones. When the scope is limited and familiar — a container to hold liquid temporarily for drinking — one has to try very hard to design badly. When the scope is broad and novel — a cashless and paperless ticketing system for a large urban transport system — the risks of poor systems and rapid obsolescence increase.

This is where the hackers, or guerilla designers, come in. Hackers take a designed system or object and modify it for their own needs, sometimes by changing the thing itself, sometimes by combining it with other things to produce new possibilities. Unpaid and usually unrecognised, the hacker delights in the intellectual challenge and the satisfaction of making something for practical use. Sometimes the results are crude, sometimes elegant. The only true criterion for success is that they work.

Relatively few people have the inclination or opportunity to work as big-D professional designers, but as design tools and the hacker ethic become ever more embedded in the general population, the world is looking a lot more malleable than it used to be.

Where do you want to hack today?

Getting to Less is all about helping designers decide what to keep and what to throw out of their designs. Whether you’re designing software, websites, products or cities, you need to choose what to include and what to omit. But how?

Before we can even start to list the current and proposed features of our product so that we can evaluate them, we need to step back and look at the bigger picture. Even though we may have a specification or requirements document (though often we don’t!), we need to get back to the original problem or opportunity that is the reason for our product existing.

Flabby products come from forgetting what the product is designed to do and for whom. So let’s remind ourselves – and write down:

• who is this product for?
• who is it not for?
• what is the core function or purpose?
• what problems does it solve?
• what problems does it not attempt to solve?
• what opportunities does this product exploit?

This doesn’t have to be a long narrative document. A photo of a spread of Post-it notes on a whiteboard will be more than good enough, but make sure you keep it in the project folder so you can go back to it when your focus starts to drift.

This process is particularly necessary when revising a product. On the first iteration, the design objectives are often relatively clear. The original designers are the team. But once you come to the first revision, you could have a different team and different management. It’s easy to lose sight of the original vision.

So don’t even attempt to refine a product before you can clearly state what it’s for. Critically refocus the design team on its reason for existing and take it forward from there.

Part 3 of Getting to Less to follow soon. Stay tuned.

The question for designers is “How?” How do we know when something is just right, and when it’s too much or not enough? How do we separate the essential from the peripheral? When do we stop?

It’s easy to coin meaningless slogans like “if in doubt, throw it out” but they give little help to the designer trying to refine their product to the point of optimal usefulness and usability without making it useless.

John Maeda approaches the subject in his book The Laws of Simplicity. His first law of simplicity is Reduce. He writes:

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.

Anyone then expecting a discussion of how we set out to thoughtfully reduce will be disappointed. The matter is sidestepped entirely and the rest of the chapter details strategies for minimising the impact of what remains.

This series of posts will give you a toolbox of strategies for thoughtful reduction, whether you’re designing software or websites, products, layouts or just decluttering your home.

Strategies for Scope

How many features should our product have? How long should our article be? How many books is it reasonable to own? The strategies for scope help us find the right quantity of things to have.

Strategies for Selection

Which features should our product have? Which issues should our article address? Which books should we own? The strategies for selection help us to discriminate between the things worth including and those we can leave out.

This is a series in progress. I aim to complete it within the next two weeks, so please stay tuned.

Part 2: Critically refocus