Recently, I have started to look further into the development of applications and interfaces. This is partially due to a class I took during the winter at SCAD, but also because of my current internship at McKinney, where this is the focus of my work. And in several discussions I had over the past few months I realized that the development of applications — in whatever sense, desktop, mobile, web application or even kiosk systems — bears a great risk of overachieving things. This might work in some scenarios, but in application development it is highly risky. Because with it comes a loss of focus and simplicity.

Usually, we have a tendency to welcome those who overachieve. Think of Apple’s “one more thing”. We celebrate the extra element, that surprises us, doing so much more than we imagined.

As part of the aforementioned class, I did some research on simplicity and came across John Maeda’s great book “Laws of Simplicty, which has since then be a great help to keep interfaces streamlined and manageable. And even in this book, Maeda mentions how customers appreciate a small thing that is big on delivery. The element of surprise makes the artifact more likely to have a positive impact on its user. Yet at the same time it is important to keep things manageable. And this is where a lot of interfaces and applications are at risk. They want to serve every possible scenario that its users could come up with, even if this means including functions that are hardly ever going to be used by the majority of users. This leads to interfaces that are cluttered and extremely complex. The feeling of pleasant surprise might still be there at the end of an interaction, but to get there, a user has to overcome the daunting feeling of being completely overwhelmed and lost in a myriad of buttons, clickable links or other calls to action.

One of the best lessons I took away from both Maeda’s book and my class was the division between important features and a wish list. My professor insisted that we wrote down our problem, our goal and our objective. And then plan our features accordingly. If something adds value to accomplishing the goal, it is an important feature. When we moved towards the description of our users, writing a summary of their lifestyle and personality and the way they would use our application, we added a list of things that they would really wish to see in the app. Each of these wishes was then compared to the end goal, and if it made it a lot easier, it was considered to become a feature. If it was more a nice thing to have, it got thrown out. A very helpful rule in this was to never justify getting rid of something, but to always justify keeping something. This way you ensure that you only keep the things that really matter.

In our time, where mobile devices fulfill a myriad of functions, our networks are a connection of countless nodes, it is the easy interfaces with a specific focus that engage users, giving them a feeling of being able to master the application at hand. Overwhelming interfaces don’t make users feel like they are in control, but rather they cause the anxiety of simply going through the motions.

You only need to look at the popularity of applications such as Twitter — focussed on the communication of very short messages — or Instagram — focussed on sharing photos, no videos, no audio. And then compare it to the constant outcries about changes to Facebook’s interface. Its users no longer feel like they understand how to manage the immense complexity of the site.

What interface and application development really need, is more consideration of their users’ needs, and less about fancy additional features. In our hectic times, focus and simplicity help us navigate our environment. The world is already complex enough without additional interfaces to further complicate our lives.