January 19, 2005

Simplicity

I've been thinking about simplicity a lot lately.

Maybe it's because I'm mentally getting ready for the Building Basecamp workshop next week. Two of the bullet points in their agenda are:

  • What is the "LESS SOFTWARE" approach all about?
  • How does "SAYING NO BY DEFAULT" lead to a more focused product?

They clearly practice what they preach. Look no further than the recently launched Ta-Da Lists. The site features just about the easiest to use UI this side of pen and paper.

Or, I could be thinking about simplicity because of Phillip J. Eby's post entitled "The Courage to do things Simply." Phillip tells the story of a former boss who pushed his team to look for simplicity.

Maybe my mind is on simplicity because of Phil Windley's mention of a project that is anything but simple: FBI's Virtual Case File May Be Unusable.

I've been feeling that many of things I've been working on tend toward the FBI rather than Ta-Da. Not because we're spending $170 Million on a failure (we're not spending that much, nor will we fail). But because often real life is messy, and trying to bring technology into it—either as a tool or to model it—is hard work. But Ta-Da and Eby remind me that I need to keep striving for simplicity among the complexity.