There was a famous quote from the legendary Bill Gates: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” The idea is that, especially in some fields, we have a tendency to overwork and overthink things, and generally make life a lot harder for ourselves.
As the expertise of the speaker would suggest, software and app development tends to have regular issues with this concept. It's very common for development processes and schedules to be completely thrown off by bloat in design, features getting added and removed over and over and a million other things stemming from the team wanting to add in everything possible.
If you're looking into software development, here are a few tips for keeping everything as simple as it should be.
Nothing More To Add
To summarize this section, here is another quote from a different great mind: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He said "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" and that is the ideal mentality to take into any development project. As designers, there is an instinct to put as many cool features as possible into whatever you're making. At best, this ends up drowning out the main feature of your app. At worst, it can cause major delays as the team struggles to get everything working correctly.
There are a number of great examples of apps such as Wolt or Pinterest which are praised for doing exactly what they aim to and little more. As a result, their core features have had time to settle in and have their bugs ironed out, and while Wolt has ended up adding a few more features, they've done so sparingly and only in cases that feel natural to the rest of the app features.
A Quiet Screen
Anyone who was around in the early days of the Internet will remember the era of packing every website with as many moving pieces and flashy graphics as possible. Thankfully, design has evolved beyond that and the modern thinking is to marry function equally with form. This means that everything the user sees on-screen needs to have a specific purpose and anything that doesn't should be cut out.
We will discuss this more later but, in general, the less your user has to look at on screen, the faster they understand the concept and the happier they will be using it. For a prime example, casino games have gotten this particular point down to an art form. Probably the best case would be the Aviator style of game, which has been refined down so much that the simplest versions are just a single button and a 16-bit plane graphic. It means that someone could play Aviator on Paddy Power or elsewhere, join the game and just start playing without needing a tutorial which would slow everything down.
Remember The Human
Everything we've already discussed feeds in some way into the most critical tip we can give you. Always remember that the ones using your app or software will be human and you should be aiming for the best human experience at the end. It's the reason that flowcharts are so critical at the start of the planning process.
Source: Unsplash
The key concept is this: your users should be able to do what they want to do on your app in the shortest and most efficient way possible and it's your job to get them there. This could be keeping the feature count low and the screen uncluttered as we already mentioned, or it could be the inclusion of features like Stories in the Instagram app to maximize user engagement and adapt to changing demographics.
Remember that your users may not praise great design but they will certainly notice if things get too complicated or annoying to use. Measure your success less by the number of 5-star reviews and more by the number of 1-star reviews.
All in all, it boils down to a single design philosophy: get the most effect from the least features. When you're milking a cow, the target is maximum milk, minimum moo.
