Is there anything new to report about simplicity, or its virtues?
Perhaps.
To get the conversation started, consider "Fifteen ways to shut down a Windows laptop"
On the serious side, I happened upon the book "Ten Laws of Simplicity" by John Maeda. You can download the book on Kindle for $12, but here's the gist:
But of course, there are many learned treatise' on this topic. For instance, David Pogue writes about gadgets, and his 'cause celebre' is also simplicity. In a TED talk on this , Pogue's "rules" (rules is probably an overstatement) are:
- People like to surround themselves with unnecessary power
- If you improve a piece of software often enough you eventually ruin it
- One approach to simplicity is 'let's break it down'. (but disaggregation leads to its own form of complexity, e.g. the trees rather than the forest)
- Violate consistency in favor of intelligence (don't alphabetize US on a list of 200 countries for US users)
- Easy is hard: pre-sweat the details
- Simplicity sells
Pogue actually mixes in some humor with his talent for piano and song:
