Why Simple Design Wins Every Time
11 June 2024 · Rich Bartlett
There's a trap that catches almost every designer at some point: the belief that more is better.
More features. More options. More content. More visual elements. The thinking goes: give users everything, and they'll find what they need. In practice, giving users everything means asking them to do the work of figuring out what matters — and most of them won't bother. They'll leave.
The Google test
Think about Google's homepage. It's been the world's most-visited website for decades. And what's on it?
A logo. A search bar. Two buttons.
That's it. Everything else Google could have put there — news, advertising, trending searches, product promotions — is conspicuously absent. The reason: Google knows exactly what users come to do, and designed the entire experience around doing that one thing as frictionlessly as possible.
This is what John Maeda calls the Laws of Simplicity: reduce, organise, and time the delivery of complexity so that what remains is exactly what the user needs.
The simplicity trap
Here's the paradox: simplicity is hard. It's much easier to add things than to remove them. Every stakeholder has a feature they want included. Every edge case seems to warrant its own UI element. Every possible user action feels like it deserves a button.
Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think captures this perfectly. The single most important thing a designer can do is eliminate question marks. Every time a user has to pause and wonder "What does this do? Where does this go? What do I click?", you've created friction. And friction has a cost.
A three-step approach
When I'm working on a design — whether it's a course, an interface, or a document — I come back to three questions:
1. What is the one thing this needs to do? Not the three things, or the five things. The one thing. If you can't name it, you're not ready to design yet.
2. What can I remove? Start from what's there and ask: does this element serve the core task? If the honest answer is "not directly", it's a candidate for removal. Be ruthless.
3. What does a real user think? Not a colleague who knows the project. Not you. A person who has never seen it before. Watch them use it. Don't explain. Note where they hesitate, click the wrong thing, or give up. That's your to-do list.
The paradox of effort
The most effortless experiences are usually the result of the most effort. Google's homepage looks simple because it's been ruthlessly refined. The Shinkansen bullet train's noise problem was solved by years of observation and iteration, not by adding more engineering.
Simple design isn't lazy design. It's the hardest kind — because it requires you to understand users deeply enough to give them less, not more.
Further reading: Nielsen Norman Group on simplicity in UX, Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.