Wired interactive map of the people, companies, and technologies spawned by the Force.

Luke Wrobleski has written a great article discussing the difference between perceived and actual simplicity and what it means to designers. Simplicity is more than the perception of spareness or bareness of design. In actuality, simplicity probably has more to do with ease of use than with appearance, and achieving simplicity can be a complex task.

Wrobleski illustrates the Pareto principle applied to expert user features on sites like eBay and You Tube. On those sites 80% of activity comes from perhaps 20% of the users. These are often the expert users, who want to do more than simply find products or watch an occassional movie. Those users are the one's that add the most value to the system, so features that enable those users to be empowered need to be addressed. So how does that user type's need impact simplicity of the experience for others?

Tufte speaks of information density, how much screen real estate is devoted to useful information, as a measure of an information object's effectiveness at communicating messages. "Usefulness" is the operative word there. Data dense interfaces don't necessarily lead to ease of use. The point is that if the ratio of useful data to chart junk is good, the object has better information density. It is the usefulness of the interface for helping users get things done is what leads to actual simplicity.

Achieving a simple experience when the spectrum of needs of users are varied is complicated, but possible. He points out that some interfaces have tried to balance those needs, e.g. Microsoft Office's partially hidden menus. I don't know many people that would argue that the MS menu design has lead to a simplified experience.

The implication is that you probably want to find a way to make expert-enabling features available because they probably serve that 80% of value to your product or service. Making those features available is what makes the experience simple for those users. But how to do it? One suggestion in the comments is practical and probably generizable for most web sites. Michael Zuschlag writes:

I think the answer is that, while experts do use expert features, even they rarely use them. Most of the time expert features are a distraction even for experts. That doesn’t necessarily mean designers must eliminate or hide expert features, but it does suggest that designs should be proportional, with commonly used features easy to see and select, and rarely used expert features being less obtrusive, even if less convenient.

Sound simple enough? The proof, I suppose, is when the executed design is deemed useful to the types of users it serves.

Google's new Finance site is really quite elegant. The site offers information on North American stocks, mutual funds and public and private companies along with charts, news and fundamental financial data. Different things to watch for here are interactive charts, and the blog and discussion group retrieval. Most of the other tear sheet type information, e.g. news, company profile (description), and finances you'll find on all of the other finance sites as well.

The line/spark line chart scrolling is cool. it automatically scrolls to the news for the period you are browsing in the chart. You can also change the range of dates in the chart by resizing the year widget -- mouse over the years at the top of the chart and a little resizing widget appears. When you drag and resize the date range, the main line graph shrinks or expands to show better detail on that range and the news box on the right refreshes to show only the items in that date range. Very nice, clean and simple use of AJAX.

Don Norman recently attempted a simplicity backlash after a few articles touted Google's simple UI as one of the reasons for it's success. Most of these simplicity articles talk about the spareness of its search interface as opposed to Yahoo's, for instance. Finance people are also saying that Google is not presenting a clear enough strategy and that their tools are all over the place. I might agree with that. They have a lot of applications that never seem to make it out of Beta.

Norman says that the simplicty factor breaks down when you try to do anything outside of searching web corpus. His argument is valid. If you view Google as a suite of tools for retrieving information, there is often a disconnection between the bodies of indexed data. The problem is rooted partly in poor information architecture problem and partly in poor interaction design. Norman is saying, I think, that the site doesn't yet allow the integration of the pieces into one UI, and rather segments it by application (and dare I say, by working group within Google?).

But when they do rich applications like Google Maps and this new Finance site, they DO do it rather simply and elegantly. (The Google News Reader on the other hand, ugh! That thing needs to take a lesson from these Beta apps.) With Maps and Finance their focus and execution on the functionality of simple little interaction widgets, e.g. moving a Google map around with a cursor, changing a data set range with a scrolling widget, is what sets them apart. In the end, our discerete interaction with specific tools is what is simple, and it's why I continue to use them over other sites. I don't care if their products are siloed and perhaps require poking around in the labs or clicking tabs to find them. When I get there, there is very little menu cruft in the way and it lets me get the job done quickly and efficiently.