Global Goals for Simplification
What Does "Simple" Mean? | Simplicity | Transparency | Effectiveness and Efficiency
What Does "Simple" Mean?
What simplicity is, may seem quite obvious to you. However, if you take a closer look, it turns out that simplicity has many facets. Some overlap but others may even contradict each other. Thus, the inconspicuous word "simple" can have diverse meanings for different people and under different perspectives. The picture below, might be a possible result of a brainstorming session on the theme of: "What does simple mean?":
Figure: The many meanings of "simple"
While at first sight there seems to be no structure in the many aspects of "simple," a closer reveals the following three basic aspects of simplicity:
We will use these "global goals for simplification" as organizers for further "secondary" principles that elaborate the basic aspects. Before doing so, let's take a short look at the three global goals!
Simplicity
Simplicity means that things are simple. However, making things simple is not an easy task in today's complex business environments. Simplification is a continuous struggle between task requirements and user requirements. From the users' point of view, an application should be simple in the sense that it does not build up a barrier between them and their tasks. It should be more or less "invisible" to the users and enable them to focus on their tasks.
Why Simplicity?
There are many answers to this question. We will mainly provide a psychological argument. Your users are humans, not computers or machines. People have certain abilities but also a number of limitations with respect to their information processing capabilities. It is important to know and respect these limitations – otherwise, you overstrain and frustrate users. (You find some of their characteristics in What does cognitive psychology tell us about users?)
With respect to the users' personal goals, as well as to company goals, many of the arguments in favor of simplicity relate to efficiency. We will cover those arguments there.
Why Not Simplicity Alone?
Simplicity alone is not a sensible goal for application design. Making an application too simple may mean that it does not achieve its goals and, in the worst case, may be useless. You have to balance simplicity with other goals, such as the purpose of a program, which is reflected in its functionality. Making an application too complex, on the other hand, may render it unusable. Thus, application design is the art of finding the right balance between the opposing threats of an application being useless or unusable!
Transparency
Users should always understand what is going on in an application with respect to their tasks and the required steps to take – not with respect to the inner working of the application. This is the essence of transparency! For example, users should always know the state of their task, what to do next, where to go next, what the consequences of certain user actions are, and so on.
Transparency has several aspects. It relates to the overall structure of an application, as well as to the structure of the navigation, procedures and functionality in general.
Why Transparency?
Transparency helps users
- To maintain orientation, which is an important and essential human need
- To focus on the task because they are not distracted by other tasks, such as deciphering how the application works
It also reduces the users' working memory load because they need to remember less information about the application, its state, and its working principles.
Effectiveness and Efficiency
Effectiveness and efficiency are the primary goals for any software in a business environment. Effectiveness means that your application does what you designed it for and that users can accomplish their goals with your application. Efficiency requires that performance is fast and error-free. Both goals have also to be viewed with respect to the prospective users of your application. Users may vary in their skills and abilities and thus may require different user interface designs.
Why Effectiveness and Efficiency?
Customers buy your application in order to computerize their business processes and to make them more efficient. If their employees cannot use your application, this is wasted money for the customer!
More often, users somehow manage to master an application, but they work inefficiently. Inefficient software also costs money:
- Users take longer to accomplish their tasks.
- Users are frustrated, because the application is seen as an obstacle to accomplishing their tasks. This in turn leads to a vicious circle with respect to costs, efficiency, and user satisfaction.
Source: Simplifying for Usability