This is a statement I see all the time; its explicitly stated in documentation for software, but is increasingly implied for all sorts of consumer products.

Instead, I think complicated things are just complicated.

It used to be that it was okay to let the machine do the work, just push a button and behind the scenes the right thing happens. But at some point it seems the problem of feature creep has made its way out into the wild, such that a product without a long list of features is not worth as much as a product that does a few things really well.

And complex interfaces are not just going to reduce usability and usefulness for your consumer product. Lots of aircraft- and industrial accidents have poor interface design as at least a contributing factor. Even well-trained, experienced operators can get confused or miss the key component when confronted with too many conflicting or unclear signals.

So, how do you solve this? The pat answer is "hire designers." Engineers (and developers) do a fine job engineering and developing, but tend to want to throw every feature right up top.

But specifically, there are processes anyone can follow. When I am designing very strictly, I make sure to explicitly:

• Gather the features (from marketing and technical requirements, user research or competitor product evaluations) and turn them into functions or information to be presented
• Filter out all the functions that are easier to just let the system deal with, or don't need to be done
• Group all the remaining functions and information logically
• Prioritize so that the most key functions and info are the most visible and easily accessed

As you might expect "filter" is the hardest step, entirely because you have to justify everything to every stakeholder.

But you can apply the rest of the process anyway. A few years ago I had to redesign the desktop web interface for a 2-way SMS system. It ended up being fearsomely simple; there's no longer a help system and the only error messages are for system outages. But aside from the basic sending and receiving components, there were another fifty requirements that just "had" to be included — difficult things like blocking, international sending and network-type selection. So a few went into a contact management system, and the rest into settings. Once the user gets into these sections, large hierarchically-organized groups of information and selectors are presented. The vast bulk of the users (way over 99%) are not burdened with it at all.

And this is successful. Hundreds of thousands of messages a day, practically no abandoned sessions, and certainly no complaints for either simplicity or complexity from anyone.

Original Source: Little Springs Design