Nick Lewis: The Blog

Over the past few days, I've observed an isolated thunderstorm in my RSS reader. The first hints began when Don Norman blogged "Simplicity is Highly Overrated". Norman writes:

"Marketing rules – as it should, for a company that ignores marketing is a company soon out of business. Marketing experts know that purchase decisions are influenced by feature lists, even if the buyers realize they will probably never use most of the features. Even if the features confuse more than they help."

It wasn't long before the infamous Joel on Software picked up on Don's post -- and that's when the slashdotting began.

After an obligitory "I've been talking about this for years" disclaimer, Joel made a priceless clarification:

Devotees of simplicity will bring up 37signals and the Apple iPod as anecdotal proof that Simple Sells. I would argue that in both these cases, success is a result of a combination of things: building an audience, evangelism, clean and spare design, emotional appeal, aesthetics, fast response time, direct and instant user feedback, program models which correspond to the user model resulting in high usability, and putting the user in control, all of which are features of one sort, in the sense that they are benefits that customers like and pay for, but none of which can really be described as “simplicity.” For example, the iPod has the feature of being beautiful, which the Creative Zen Ultra Nomad Jukebox doesn't have, so I'll take an iPod, please. In the case of the iPod, the way beauty is provided happens to be through a clean and simple design, but it doesn't have to be. The Hummer is aesthetically appealing precisely because it's ugly and complicated.

These arguments are indeed true, but as someone who spends his days designing web applications I'm less than convinced that these observations apply to me. 

A web app is neither a washing machine, nor a piece of enterprise grade software.

Not to go on a rant here, but lately I've become increasingly tired of the hiflautin language of my trade. Its a profession which is infested with poly-word-rendered[1] monstrosities of terminology: "content management system", "constituent relationship management system", "hierarchical taxonomy"... One sometimes gets the sense that such terminology wasn't chosen on the basis of being the most accurate way of describing the given object, but rather because it happened to be the most impressive sounding to the layman.