Setting Objectives

Project teams will often spend more time arguing over the details than making the big decisions. So before you begin, it’s useful to have some definitions and ways of judging whether one design is better than another.

Details Matter

By the time the track cycling competition closed at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the British team had won 7 out of the 10 gold medals. They had also won 7 out of 10 at the Beijing Olympics four years previously. To win one gold requires immense effort. To dominate a sport requires something more.

Isabelle Gutharon, the French team performance director said the wheel manufacturers who supplied both teams must have been favoring the British. Canadian women’s track coach Tanya Dubnicoff joked that the British had “magnets under the track” to pull their riders.

The real reason for their success is perhaps more astonishing. Dave Brailsford, the British team boss, revealed that the team based its overwhelming success on marginal gains. “[It] came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by one percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together,” he explained on the final day of the event.

Those marginal gains came from unexpected places. The British team taught its riders how to wash their hands thoroughly, so they would get ill less and be able to train more consistently. They spent time in a wind tunnel to identify minute improvements to their posture. Team members were even issued with special pillows to ensure they slept in the correct position to ensure they were properly rested and recovered.

You can examine any complex experience by breaking it down into tiny details.

Other sporting teams have adopted the principle of marginal gains. For instance, on its way to winning the 2013 Formula 1^®( World Championship, the Red Bull team redesigned the nuts on its wheels to enable faster pit stops. In the US Grand Prix the team recorded a pit stop, including changing all four wheels, with the car stationary for just 1.9 seconds. Details matter.

That also applies if you’re designing a web or mobile app. Amazon found that an increase in page download time of just 100 milliseconds (a difference that’s barely perceptible to humans) was enough to cause a 1 percent drop in sales. The difference between average and exceptional lies in hundreds such marginal gains.

Most companies find it easy to justify spending large sums on developing new features, content, and capabilities for their digital products—even when there’s scant evidence that users want or need those features. However, this book is founded on the belief that creating something exceptional comes from breaking what you’re doing into individual components and looking for tiny gains. Simplicity is in the details.

Marginal gains in performance make the difference between turning up and winning.

Defining Simplicity

It’s hard to come up with examples of simplicity that everyone can agree on. Is a piano simple? It’s simple to pick out a tune on one, but it’s complex to master. Is a gadget like a hand whisk simple? Yes, but a kitchen crammed full of gadgets becomes cluttered and complex to master. You can take almost any example of simplicity and think of a situation where it’s also complex.

The problem is that simplicity isn’t an objective quality. Simplicity is a feeling, something personal that depends on your point of view. In other words: to make something simple you have to know who you’re designing for. That means understanding your users’ knowledge, attitude, and context.

Knowledge falls into two categories: knowledge about the tools (computers) and knowledge about the task. It’s natural to assume that everyone knows what you know, but that’s rarely the case. If you’re designing a computer interface, you probably spend so much time using computers you forget that others know less. If you are basing your ideas on your favorite app, it’s hard to believe that other people might not like it as much as you. And if you’re immersing yourself in designing a task, you’ll learn every permutation and edge case so you’ll become so familiar with it that it’s hard to think like a novice.

A piano keyboard can seem simple or complex depending on your point of view.

Attitude to the task and to technology is important. I divide people into experts (the minority who want to perfect their performance) and mainstreamers (the vast majority who just want to get things done). Designing for mainstreamers means focusing on what really matters—it’s the key to simplicity.

The users’ context is the situation in which they understand the task. How important is this task in their day? How much time do they have? What distractions do they face? When we’re distracted or stressed, even accomplished experts tend to act like bumbling mainstreamers. In this book, when I talk about something being simple, I generally mean feels simple for a mainstream user who’s in a hurry.

Measuring Simplicity

If we’re simplifying details, we need a way of figuring out whether one idea is simpler than another—a measurement. But we’ve seen that simplicity is a feeling, so it’s not something that can be measured directly. Instead, we need indirect measures.

One way to think about simplicity for interactions is that it’s a kind of extreme usability; when something is just about usable, then the target audience can muddle through. But when something is extremely usable, then it feels simple to them.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) definition of usability breaks it down into three components: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Each of those qualities, if measured and taken together, can give you a rounded view of usability or simplicity.

Effectiveness is how well an interface helps someone achieve a goal. Ideally, you’d measure that through task completion rates. If half the people who try to buy something from your website fail, then your checkout process is 50 percent effective. But there are other measures that give you clues about effectiveness. For instance, you might also look at error rates: ideally users should experience low rates of error. You could also look at how much of a task is completed. So even if everyone completes your registration process, but some of them fail to include optional information such as photos, then you’d downgrade its effectiveness.

Interactions that feel simple score highly for efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction.

Efficiency is how much effort it takes to complete a task. Typically, that’s measured by looking at the time taken in completing a task. Fast, consistent completion times are a sign of an efficient interface. Since most interfaces require some learning, the efficiency scores for novice users will differ from those for experienced users.

Satisfaction is how good people feel about using an interface. What’s satisfying depends on the user’s context and expectations. For a video game, satisfaction might equate to enjoyment or challenge, but for an online bank satisfaction could be trust or confidence. Satisfaction and effectiveness are strongly linked: people tend to like interfaces that are highly effective. But it’s not a given. There are plenty of effective interfaces that don’t feel satisfying. Timesheets are an example of this: I’ve never met anyone who wanted to complete one or who felt their timesheet software was satisfying, no matter how effective it was.

To feel simple, your interface or user experience has to score highly with its users in all three qualities: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Because users’ expectations change—both for individuals over time and between individuals—that feeling of simplicity is always elusive.