Simplicity? What have we given up?

Posted on | November 22, 2009 | No Comments

There is no questioning my love of technology and gadgetry, but I am not the person who goes out and buys for the sake of having the newest thing on the block.

In fact I have only, this month, bought my iPhone, and am loving it.

It was using my new iPhone that made me sit up and pay a bit more attention to the state of our mediated environment.

What I have noticed is we have 3 distinct groups trying to create things they want us to use.

Group one is the computer programming lot that are great at creating stuff but not at all good at making them user friendly! OK there are some exceptions but these are few and far between. Take the BlackBoard education software system as a case in point. BlackBoard is suppose to make it easier for the teacher and student to interact in a variety of WEB2.0 like ways and in the end it simply becomes too complicated and cumbersome to navigate.

So where do users turn? Group 2 of course.

Group 2 is the designer who is creating content. The designer is very interested in the look and feel, and if they get it right, the experience of the user. Think a WordPress blog if you want to get a feel for the designer side of technology.

But even the designer product can be awkward as it has a great look and feel but it still fails to deliver what is being sought is an easy straight forward manner.

And that brings me to my iPhone and group 3.

Tech/design/constrained.

Usually when you say to someone that you are constraining their work it adopts negative connotations.  But in the case of technology and its application today constraint is actually a good thing and this is very clearly seen with the iPhone.

Because of limitations of the device apps are forced on the iPhone to be minimalist and this has, in my opinion, made many more effective and useful than the parent site they are adaptations of.  Case in point is the New York Times.  While there is no questioning the utility of the NYT website it is still full, cluttered and maybe even congested creating a navigational tie up that is not intuitive and maybe even distracting.

The NYT app on the other hand is short, sweet and to the point delivering relevent content in a simple navigable manner. The same can also be said for the CBC app.

What this all says to me is that we have lost the plot when it comes to creating functional and usable web resources. We are getting more complex and more showy and in the process forgetting why we created the resource in the first place!

I hope that when people look at the success of iPhone apps they don’t just look at the app itself but the message those apps are sending, keep it simple!

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