Books: The Laws of Simplicity

Simple is the new complex. The goal of software used to be to create the most powerful and complex piece of software possible. Look at Visual Studio and Eclipse. Now compare it to TextMate, the most talked about IDE (if you can even call it an IDE) in recent months. Compare the Yahoo or MSN homepage to the Google homepage. Compare Outlook to Gmail. Compare Yahoo or MSN Messenger to Google Talk. Compare a fancy animated presentation with a Takahashi Method presentation. The goal isn’t to create the largest most complex powerful application anymore, it’s to create the simplest application without sacrificing essential functionality.

Unfortunately it’s not as easy as it sounds. Creating an application that does what you need it to, but remains simple, is incredible difficult and tricky. The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) by John Maeda, an MIT professor,  is a collection of 10 laws about attaining simplicity . The book has large type, in a small binding, and is still only 100 pages long. (It would surely be hypocrisy to write a massive book on simplicity.) Each law makes a simple statement and then discusses how it works and how it is applied often including useful examples.

As I read each of the ten laws I could quickly see how these laws have been used and applied in recent applications. One great example is law number 2 which extols the benefits of organization as a means of making something simpler. The law states:

“Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.”

Office 2007 is an excellent example of this. The new ribbon interface took one of the most complex applications around and tried to simply it by organizing the essential features and hiding the rest. Whether you like the feature or not it is hard to argue that it doesn’t make using Word much simpler.

The line from the book that sticks with me the most is the following:

“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”

I think this is a great statement that can really be applied to many things in life. In particular it plays a huge role in good writing. Subtracting obvious or meaningless words and adding meaningful words is a sure way to improve your writing. For instance this sentence:

“The fact of the matter is that SubText is a cool blogging engine”

is much better simplified to:

“SubText is a cool blogging engine”

The removed text is just meaningless complexity.

It’s probably needless complexity at this point to say it; but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I encourage all of you to pick it up and spend the couple of hours it will take to read through it.

-James