“What’s so hard about being simple?” could easy fill a book but there are a few common factors:

• People don’t realise that when you add something you take something away. Your increase in literal functionality gets traded off against clarity, ease of use, ease of learning and user satisfaction.
• People find it hard to make decisions. Tell your children that they can have 30 Christmas presents and they’ll happily start writing lists. Tell them that they can have only one — within reason, anything — and they’ll probably hate you forever. It’s so much easier to throw in the kitchen sink than think through what you really need.
• You can’t predict the future. Trying to anticipate hypothetical future needs is a great way to buy a ton of junk that you don’t need now and won’t ever need. But if your procurement process is lengthy and cumbersome and you’re going to have to live with a new system for several years it’s tempting to grab everything you can because you know you won’t have a chance to do it later.

For corporate IT I’d recommend:

• Start small. Purchase or build the minimum system you need to meet your current needs and build it up from there when necessary and not before.
• Choose or build modular systems that can be extended when necessary rather than having to throw out the whole system and trade up.
• Use systems that can talk to each other. Follow the Unix philosophy of systems that do one thing well and can easily be combined with other systems to produce toolchains and capabilities that are much greater than the sum of their parts.
• Streamline procurement. Build in preferences for small systems and short-term contracts. Try to make it as cheap as possible to change your mind and to trade up when future needs change rather than forcing people to stick with systems that no longer suit them.
• Hire some good developers (Hi!). Many useful small systems can be quickly and cheaply built in-house in far less time and for far less money than buying a commercial product. When that system needs a small change you can quickly and cheaply just make it rather than being at the mercy of an external supplier to do it. They could take months or they might not be interested in doing it at all.

This post started life as a comment at We Love Local Government.

In our increasingly frenetic world, things that let you do what you want to do with the minimum of obstruction, frustration and delay are needed more than ever. Like Don Norman’s invisible computer, this is design that all but disappears when you use it. It gets out of your way and defaults to shutting up. Its sophistication is not in trying to be smart, much less in trying to be impressive or entertaining. It’s subtle, humble and discreet, working in the service of you the user rather than trying to draw attention to itself. Most of all it is design as our servant rather than our master.

Dieter Rams says:

Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.

The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.

Lightness can be measured as value for effort. The less effort you need to expend in learning, maintaining and satisfying the product you’re using for a given amount of genuine benefit the better. If you’re flying through the things you want to do without obstruction, that’s lightness. If it feels like you’re wading through treacle, that’s not.

Lightness is an imperative. We’ve got better things to do than to perform incantations and rituals just to take care of the mundane details of everyday life. Our energies should be directed towards curing the world’s ills, being with our families and making sense of it all, not coaxing printers to print, navigating endless telephone menus and jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Life is far too short to be a slave to a system or to a machine.

Here are a few examples of things that embody lightness, to a degree at least:

Gmail was revolutionary when it first launched. Aside from a generally slick user interface, the two features that really struck me as important were a huge storage quota for your mail and effective spam filtering. Being liberated from having to worry about whether you were running out of space for your mail really changed the way that people thought about webmail. It also led to other webmail providers following suit by increasing their quotas too. Removing 99.5% of spam from your inbox was another relief. Spam is something entirely incidental to what users want from email. Gmail showed that the spam problem was a solvable one, at least at the user’s end. Gmail is light because it lets you focus on your mail rather than the things — storage space and spam — that other systems forced you to think about just to be able to do your mail.

First Direct is a phone and web-only bank. It’s open around the clock, so you never have to worry about opening hours if you want to call. First Direct’s service is so resilient that it has been continuously available since it launched in 1989. When they say they’re always open, they mean always. First Direct is light because it fits itself to the customer rather than the other way around. The customer doesn’t have to memorise or look up opening hours. Customers can get on with their lives, knowing that they can always phone their bank in any spare moment they happen to have. The idea of 24-hour service doesn’t seem so strange in the age of the Internet but First Direct were well ahead of the game with building a very different relationship with their customers than was traditional in retail banking.

Dyson’s DC35 is a rechargeable vacuum cleaner that’s optimised for mobility. Which is more convenient — plugging in your cleaner when you’re using it or plugging it in when you’re not? The DC35 is both slim and light so it’s not a burden to carry the DC35 up stairs or around the house. The lightness of the DC35 comes from its literal light weight. It’s a physical product that you use while moving, so the lighter the better. Cleaning becomes a quick and effortless job rather than a tiring chore.

In urban design, decluttering aims to remove unnecessary and obstructive street furniture from pedestrians’ paths. Decluttering advocates like Living Streets reject the idea that pedestrians can and should be funnelled around a city like vehicles in the name of safety. People like to follow their desire lines, taking the most direct route from one place to another without having to negotiate a maze of barriers, bollards, cobbles and kerbs. A decluttered street is light because it removes physical obstructions and reduces delays and pinch points, leading to a sense of freedom of movement.

A webmail service, a bank, a vacuum cleaner, a street. These aren’t the kinds of things that many people would think of as requiring very sophisticated design approaches. This isn’t stuff to write home about. Most likely they would only draw attention when they’re wrong in some way. The inbox running out of space and full of spam. The bank that’s never open when you want to call them. The vacuum cleaner that you don’t want to haul upstairs. The street that throws up obstacles in your path rather than just lets you move. This is the mundane stuff of everyday life and much of it needs a great deal of improvement.

There is hope. The big four technology companies — Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft — all embody lightness in some of their products. As most of us are plugged into at least one of these companies’ products for much of our time, this is encouraging. These aren’t niche players. If the big four get lightness right it will be hugely influential across our broader culture. There is a possibility, perhaps even a hope, that at some point we will hit a tipping point where things in the main Just Work and our focus can return to dealing with the real issues of life rather than the contrived problems of lazy and thoughtless designers and bureaucrats.

As designers, it’s the lightness of people that we should we working towards most of all. We’ll try to take the weight from your back and clear the obstacles from your path so that you can move freely wherever you want to go.

But if you work on a council website you can make a start today by simply removing all the stuff on your site that really doesn’t need to be there.

This will be both the cheapest and highest-value redesign you’ll ever do.

It will save you money on your hosting costs. Less stuff on a page means less data coming down the pipe. Lower bandwidth charges.

Your pages will load faster and you’ll be able to defer server upgrades longer.

People will be happier that their pages load more quickly.

People will be happier that they can find what they want more easily without having to wade through clutter and confusion.

You will save on development and maintenance costs. Deleted content and features cost nothing to maintain. You’ll never have to review, fix, redesign or rewrite them again.

With a bit of luck you’ll find that you don’t need a mobile website. Your current site, without the clutter, will do just fine.

And once you get into the habit, you’ll start to be a lot more discriminating about what you put on your site in the first place. The default answer is no. Anything that goes on has to fight for its place.

To get started you’ll need a structure and a strategy.

The structure is that you’ll remove one thing every day. It’s very unlikely that you’ll run out of things to delete, but worry about that “problem” when you get there.

One page.

One section.

One microsite.

One feature.

One sidebar.

One word, sentence or paragraph.

One link.

One form field.

One button.

One image.

One form.

Just something. Get rid of it.

The strategy is a little bit harder. How do you know what to delete?

The short answer is anything you can live without.

I’ve been through my own council’s website looking for examples. So far they break down into these categories, which should give you some inspiration:

Cargo Cults

A to Z navigation. Every council site has it. But what’s it for? Your site surely isn’t a phone book that needs an index. It’s probably a hold-over from the days of static sites that didn’t have a good search feature, if they had one at all. You probably had far fewer pages in those days too so the list of links on each letter page was much shorter. Sort out your search if you need to (make it prominent, fast and accurate) and drop the A to Z.

Cargo cults are things you do because other sites do them without you giving any serious consideration of the value they provide. Perhaps they’re required by some guidelines somewhere. Maybe they made sense once but not any longer. Question them. Challenge them. Think about it. Then do what you think is right as long as you can defend it.

Content

Badly written copy. Copy that’s too long. Stuff that’s too time-sensitive for you to maintain properly. Reams of instructions for things that should be simple enough to use without explanation. Fix the underlying issues if necessary, then delete them.

Feature Duplication

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Browsers and computers have got built-in features for changing the text size, adding bookmarks, displaying the time and date and managing subscriptions to content. Don’t waste your time doing things that are already done perfectly adequately elsewhere. Could your contact form be replaced with just a simple email address?

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words, several thousand bytes, quite a bit of money every year in bandwidth and a fair amount of time to source, resize, upload and review. They take up your readers’ time and attention too, often drawing their eye from the real content on a page. Imagine this page without the text headings. Now imagine it without the photos. See which one works?

So treat pictures as content rather than decoration and make every one count. If a picture isn’t high-quality and supremely relevant to the page then drop it. There should never be a rule that every web page must have a picture. Stock photos to illustrate generic concepts are nearly always unnecessary. Showing real people, places and activities at your council may well be fine, but not much else.

Forms

Every field you add reduces the chances of someone completing the form. If you don’t need to know something, don’t ask for it. You don’t need my postal address when I’m reporting some graffiti to you.

Multi-page forms are painful. They seem to go on forever and you never know what’s on the next page. They require some kind of navigation between the pages, which adds to the complication and the scope for error. Fit the whole form on one page, even if the page looks a bit long. People can scroll. You’re not designing for a bit of paper.

The one button every form needs is the Submit button, but it should probably be called Send or Save or Report It or something that makes sense in the context of the task. If you’ve got any other buttons like Reset (i.e. Delete everything I’ve just typed) ask whether you really need it.

And it’s worth asking whether the whole form is really needed at all.

So…

Getting rid of all the clutter on your website doesn’t require a great deal of design insight or technical skill. But it needs a lot of discipline. So once a day just delete something that you can live without and you’ll be working towards a faster, cheaper, simpler website with much happier users.

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?

The Litl in conventional laptop mode and in easel mode

I have a love/hate relationship with computers. Or more properly, I love computing and hate general-purpose computers. Supposedly modern operating systems — Windows, OSX, Linux — are far too complex for the average user let alone novices. Collectively they’re responsible for wasting more human time, energy, money and ingenuity than anything in the history of civilisation. Even Facebook. A plague on all their houses.

While most users can get their machines started up and find their way somehow to the internet (generally by double-clicking the big blue “E”), most administration tasks leave them stumped. Installing, upgrading and removing software. Managing drivers and plugins. Adding new hardware. Connecting to a new ISP or wifi hotspot. Virus checking. Backups. I doubt that more than 10% of home computer users really have their systems in order and know how to do all of these things competently.

So when I see the new Digital Inclusion Task Force (it’s a UK thing, international readers) announce that there are 10 million people in the UK that have never used the internet, not only does it not surprise me but I worry that it’s a precursor to a misguided, expensive and ultimately futile attempt to get those people online with conventional, general-purpose computers. I think that would be a mistake, because such things are horribly, unnecessarily complicated if all you want to do is get online.

For this and other reasons I’m very pleased to see the launch of the Litl, though currently they appear only to be selling in the US at present. The Litl styles itself as a “webbook” and aims to massively simplify basic, everyday computing.

Almost as good as a real kitchen timer and only $690 more expensive

In many ways it’s a similar concept to the forthcoming Google Chrome OS but it runs on its own custom, simplified hardware. You get what appears at first sight to be a conventional laptop with a 12-inch widescreen. It’s not a touchscreen, so all interaction is done with the keyboard and mouse. There’s also an optional basic remote control.

In many ways the Litl is defined as much by what it doesn’t have as by what it does. Unlike a netbook, the Litl is designed to be permanently connected to the internet. There’s no hard drive, just a small 2GB internal flash card that stores programs and a temporary data cache. The full hardware spec is here. All persistent user file storage happens online — in the “cloud” — and is completely transparent to the user. This arrangement completely eliminates the need for backups. It also makes it possible for users with multiple Litls to sync them together simply by connecting them to the same online account.

There’s also no optical drive. I’ve no idea whether you can install extra software but if you can presumably it’ll be coming from an online app store rather than a DVD or a conventional installer package.

Most importantly, there’s no conventional Windows, Linux or (obviously) OSX installation. It runs a heavily customised version of Ubuntu Linux but don’t expect to find a GNOME or KDE desktop or a terminal window.

The home screen is a set of thumbnail "cards" -- no menus or icons here

The custom Litl OS starts by presenting a home screen of “cards” — large icons representing websites, apps and “channels” (persistent mini-apps). This is much more similar to the iPhone’s home screen of icons than Windows’ start menu, OSX’s dock plus Applications folder and Linux’s start menu lookalikes. As with the iPhone, a card can simply be a web bookmark. In fact, this is the only native way to store bookmarks on the system. If you want anything more sophisticated you’ll have to use an online bookmark app such as Delicious.

There’s also a search box at the top of the screen which defaults to Google.

So from power up you’re just one click away from your favourite websites and immediately able to search the web without opening a single menu or app.

This approach is both obvious and brilliant. No other OS does this, yet how many people do anything other than open their browser when they first start their computer? While  in other OS’s you can configure your browser to start automatically, almost no-one does. Most of us hunt through an icon-cluttered desktop, menu or dock. The Litl treats the web as the main event, not just one of the many things you can do with your computer but very often won’t.

And this reflects the overall Litl philosophy — concentrate on the essentials and forget the rest. That makes it far less versatile than a general purpose computer but also far easier to use and maintain. In fact, having done as much research on this machine as possible without actually getting my grubby mitts on one I’m not sure what kind of maintenance it’d actually be possible to do. All software updates are delivered automatically without asking or even notifying the user (why would they care?) As mentioned above, there’s no need for backups or any kind of conventional filesystem that might require organisation. You’ll need to select your wifi network and type your password for it when you first set it up but that’s about it.

The general response online from techies to the Litl has been lukewarm but then it’s not for them. Yes, you can get a more powerful and versatile computer for much less (Litl retails at $700). But I doubt you can get anything that has the same combination of simplicity and functionality. The nearest thing to it is probably the iPod Touch but that’s stretching it a very long way. The Litl really is in a class of its own.

If everyone can use one, everyone will want one

While Litl seem to be marketing the device as a “lifestyle” product to the kind of urbane, affluent families in their promo photography (think one Litl per member of the household, plus a couple of spares for guests), I think it’d be absolutely great for first-time computer and internet users. Whether that’s younger children, older people who retired before computers made it into the workplace or anyone else that’s somehow missed out, getting those people online should be about the opportunities that the internet offers, not the curse of owning and babysitting a fussy, fragile, high-maintenance computer.

If you can’t use a Litl you definitely won’t be able to manage Windows. If some of those new Litl users eventually “graduate” to Windows or another full OS, that’s great. And if they’re happy sticking to the Litl, that’s great too. If there aren’t rows of Litls in public libraries, schools and community centres across the country in the next year or two we’ll definitely have missed a great opportunity to get many people online that otherwise would have found it too difficult.

And wouldn’t it be greater still if the mainstream OS vendors devoted more time to simplifying their cranky, bloated systems so that the rest of us can have more power without paying the price of complexity?

John Pawson’s Sackler Crossing at Kew Gardens has won the 2008 Stephen Lawrence Prize for projects under £1 million. Prize judge Marco Goldschmeid praised the design, calling it “a masterly conjuring trick playfully deceiving the eye with light and water as its props. It is one of those rare designs where less truly is more”.

The bridge takes an intentionally low profile, giving its users the impression of walking on water. Its deck is made from bands of dark granite laid in parallel like railway sleepers. The balustrade is formed from close-set disconnected bronze cantilevers worked smooth at the top. These flat fins combined with the sinuous path of the bridge create differing optical effects depending on the position of the viewer, appearing in some parts as a solid wall, in others almost transparent. The materials are designed to age gracefully through the years as they take on a patina of use.

The Crossing dignifies its setting rather than dominates it, conveying a sense of harmony, calm and beautifully measured restraint that is sadly lacking from most of our contemporary culture, not just architecture. It is in sensitive settings like these that real design skill shines: Knowing when to stop, knowing how to add without taking away.

View the video on Pawson’s site

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

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.

Just twist and go.

No low-contrast LCD display.

No instruction booklet.

No learning curve.

No fiddly buttons.

No modes.

No batteries.

No battery cover to snap off or lose.

No battery changes.

No weedy digital beep-beep-beep.

£3 delivered.

This is simplicity. Does it really need to be any harder than this?

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