I also have an old walkman radio dating back from before CDs. It still works the same way it did when it was new. The radio cost about $20.

The difference is moving parts

Here is someone whose 30 gig iPod broke after being dropped once. Here is Arstechnica documenting an iPod Nano continuing to play after being sat on, dropped from various heights, dropped while running, dropped from moving vehicles, thrown up in the air, and then run over with a car. The 30 gig iPod’s hard-drive has moving parts, iPod Nano’s flash memory does not.

Moving parts break

I saw “Who Killed the Electric Car?” last week. At one point they showed a drawing of the inside of a General Motors EV1. It was pretty much just wheels, a steering wheel, and a row of batteries. Here is a picture of what those batteries replace:

The internal combustible engine. Moving parts, destined to break.

Here is a vague, generalized equation meant to prove a point through its scale:

77 (average life expectancy in the USA) - 24 (guesstimate at the average age a first car is purchased) / 10 (guesstimate at the average number of years a car with a combustible engine lasts before it breaks-down) = 5.3 (rough estimate of the average number of cars purchased in one person’s lifetime)

299.5 million (population in the USA) * 4.3 (average number of cars that wouldn’t be purchased if cars didn’t breakdown) * $27,958 (average cost of a car) =

$36 trillion (rough estimate of the amount of revenue the car industry can expect to lose over the next 77 years if electric cars were sold for the same amount as cars with an internal combustion engine)

Simple products have the power to bring an industry to its knees.

“The principle of the Kodak system is the separation of the work that any person whomsoever can do in making a photograph, from the work that only an expert can do. . . . We furnish anybody, man, woman or child, who has sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button, with an instrument which altogether removes from the practice of photography the necessity for exceptional facilities or, in fact, any special knowledge of the art. It can be employed without preliminary study, without a darkroom and without chemicals.” Found via Lawerence Lessig’s Free Culture

And so the people became photographers.

Having “sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button” was all that was needed to take a photo. Simplifying a task was all that was needed to create an industry.

Web applications can benefit from subscribing to this same level of simplicity.

Are we getting stupid? François Joseph de Kermadec

Big Beautiful, Dumb Whitespace

Odeo goes simple and only insults us a little 33inc.com

[Big buttons] implicitly say, “Hey, you’re too foolish to choose what to do next, so I’ve put a really big button right here just for you.” Cameron Moll

Most of these comments are a reaction to the recent Odeo redesign which, if you agree with the general consensus, does have some problems¹. But behind these comments is a sentiment that I often hear expressed in the software design community that I do not agree with: if you design something to be simple to use, you are designing it for simple people.

While I agree that the knowledge level of your audience does affect how complex you can make your software, I do not agree that it is a factor in how simple you should make your software. The answer to how simple should you make your product is always the same: as simple as possible.

There is no inherent value to complexity. It can lead to advantages, by allowing more features and greater flexibility, but new features and greater flexibility only become advantages if your users take advantage of them. Simplicity, on the other hand, does have inherent value. It reduces how long your interface takes to learn and use. Therefore, the comparison between the benefits of simplicity and complexity is between features and flexibility that may or may not become advantages to your users and immediate guaranteed benefit to all of your users.

The following factors should be considered when deciding whether to increase the complexity of your software by adding new features:

1. A percentage of your users will use the new feature, for most of these users, the value of your software will be increased by adding the new feature.
2. A percentage of users will not use the new feature, for every single one of these users, the value of your software will be reduced by adding the new feature.

In some cases, it is a no brainer. If 98% of your users will take advantage of a new feature then it should usually be added. The amount of value gained by adding a new feature that most of your users will use almost always trumps the value of leaving that feature out to preserve simplicity. But some decisions aren’t so easy, what if only 30% of your users will use a feature? Do you increase the value of your software for 30% of your users only to reduce its value for the other 70% What about 55%?

These are hard questions to answer. Every feature adds different amounts of value and complexity. But simplicity’s inherent value means your tendency should always be to lean in that direction. Note that I never mentioned the intelligence of your users as a factor in determining how complex you should make your software. That is because a far better question than “how many users can handle the new feature?” is “how many users will use the new feature?”

Finally, a counter to the stance “if you design something simple to use, you are designing for simple people.” You don’t create simple designs because people can’t figure out your product otherwise, you create them so that people don’t have to figure your product out.

1. I took a close look at the Odeo redesign while I was writing this post, and I now believe that this “redesign” is really Odeo promoting their “create recordings from your browser- or your phone” feature. This is a very interesting feature that lowers the high barrier of entry to recording your own audio. I suspect they are making a trade-off, reducing the visibility of the audio content available to download, in order to increase the number of users producing audio content on Odeo. ↑