…that “simplicity” as a buzzword is increasingly going to become heavily overused and lose its meaning over the next few months as everyone tries to jump on the “Web 2.0″ bandwagon. Think about it. What is simple, anyway? Simple for some people is complex for others, and on the other hand, simple for some people is completely useless and not helpful for others.

But lest you think I’m poo-pooing the idea of simplicity, please let me reassure you that I LOVE simplicity. I think well-conceived, intelligently-designed software that does a small number of things well is the best thing imaginable (well, in the technology world that is). But that’s the key: the goal of simplicity is to make it easy to do what you want, and easy to figure out what you want to do. Which means that you need to keep your interface sparse and your feature list small, and THAT, my friends, is very difficult for large companies to manage. I think that’s why so many cool Web 2.0 apps are being created by “startup” type companies (and even though Google has grown to astronomical proportions, it’s still operating under a startup mentality). This trend shows no sign of stopping, and that’s a good thing!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Design Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.