Which tool is the most effective? Is it better to have a complicated one with a lot of features or a simple one with a few characteristics that are only needed for one task?
Of course, the answer is dependent on the persona you’re designing for. However, unless you’re specifically targeting expert users (often professionals or people who have spent hundreds of hours perfecting your product), it’s usually better to keep things simple. Concentrate on making it a great tool for a certain set of objectives.
This shortens the learning curve for users, gives them a sense of power and effectiveness, and, most importantly for business, keeps them coming back.
Users must understand what is on their displays in order to interact with an interface-based product. People expend mental energy finding out what they can and can’t interact with when they’re forced to understand what they’re viewing. You’re interfering with their ability to achieve their objectives.
How to remove unnecessary complexity
- Reduce the number of clicks you have to make to get where you want to go. Don’t have your user travel across your application to different windows, parts, or places unnecessarily.
- Removing irritating “are you sure?” dialogue windows and modal error messages. It’s pointless to make users click twice to erase something.
- When speaking with customers, look beyond explicit wants to identify implicit needs (“what customers don’t tell you they need”). Focusing on implicit demands will reveal the underlying issues that customers are experiencing, allowing you to offer solutions. This is far superior to relying on customers to inform you of their desires.
Some steps you can follow to simplify
- Get rid of visual complexity:- Visual decorating (excessive colors and shapes, for example) is a waste of time. Popular Dribbble designs are frequently guilty of this. While branding components are sometimes required, strive to minimize features that aren’t interactive or contribute to your users’ objectives. Using too many lines and boxes is a classic example. Use typeface, grid alignment, and Gestalt principles like proximity and resemblance to creating visual structure.
- Pick three crucial traits or features:- Then nail them down to a tee, and then put everything else on the back burner. The rest is noise — those three traits determine the product’s core essence and value.
- Make sure you know what your product’s purpose is:- It’s easy to say no to unnecessary features and requests when your product has a clear vision and purpose. This is true not only for the final product but for each future release as well.
- Convert data into a meaningful format:- The majority of the products we develop on a daily basis are focused on a large amount of data that the user must interpret in order to carry out their daily tasks efficiently. When you have users who are interested in trends and changes, rather than giving them a list of data, provide them with a visual representation. On-demand, you may always show more information. Try to extract the most useful information from the data you have and present it to the user.
Why Should You Simplify Your Product?
Making the interface aesthetics and interactions consistent across views and portions of the application is another way to simplify a digital product. This can be challenging with professional or enterprise-level software, especially if development teams have added functionality haphazardly over time.
One way to address this is to streamline the development and design process by creating a design system from which to grow an application.
