Simplicity Is Highly Overrated

I only ever use 1 heat setting on my toaster. All the others are useless. If you sold me a toaster that only heated on that setting, I'd be perfectly happy. But how many other people are happy with my taste in toast? The product simply would not sell well enough.

It's the same with all the other products listed. Sure, maybe a few 'features' are unused, but without extensive market testing, you can't know which ones they are.

Digg recently removed some features... Apparently they were useful features to the community, and there were a lot of complaints about that. (Among other things.)

Facebook recently added some features... These features didn't have enough features on them, and there was a revolt. Facebook would have been fine without more features, or by adding enough new features, but they stopped somewhere in-between and paid for it.

Unsubstantiated? The OP is Don Norman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman) and he's speaking from experience. The fact that he has more experience in this branch of design than pretty much anybody else should give his argument some weight.

we could have been writing about the elephant in the room: that functional design, like journalism and sensible politics, is a lost art.

I think he was addressing this point directly, but he happens to disagree with you. Take the following as an example:

Hurrah, I said, now the entire wash can be automatic, so there need be only two controls: one to chose between “hot and colored wash” and “easy-to-clean fabrics,” the other to start the machine. Nope, this washer had even more controls and buttons than the non-automatic one. “Why even more controls? I asked my contact at Siemens, “when you could make this machines with only one or two?”.

“Are you one of those people who wants to give up control, who thinks less is better?” asked this usability expert. “Don’t you want to be in control?”

Strange answer. Why the automation if it isn’t to be trusted? And, yes, actually I am one of those bizarre people who think that less is better.

It appears that marketing won the day. And I suspect marketing was right. Would you pay more money for a washing machine with less controls? In the abstract, maybe. At the store? Probably not.

Both Norman and his friend at Siemens understood that the interface to the washing machine could have been as simple as two switches. The problem is that they need to sell washing machines when they're sitting in a row of competitive products. In their experience, people in the market for a washer tend to buy on features. And Norman never claimed that everybody buys this way, just that most people do.

Which well known products is he credited with helping designing? There's none listed on his wiki page. Wiki does say 'The Norman Group's list of clients spans from Hertz all the way to Microsoft'.

Microsoft? Those well know UX masters? Oh dear. They are a damn sight better than some, but still way behind in true usability.

And of course there's the elephant in the room, the iPod. Which does exactly the opposite of what he claims.

And there are some howlers in the article. Like when he 'bets' the $250 toaster sells well.

Bets? Does he not know marketing 101? It's there to make the overpriced medium range toasters look cheap. It's not there to sell.

The sad fact is that UX design is still a new field and as such it's in its quackery stage. That means there's a lot of people saying things they think is true because of raindance/cargocult effects. And people will say they are amazing when they're not because they occasionally hit home runs.

Consider what the real reasons the expensive ones are more desirable than the cheap ones may be. Maybe it's because they look cheap and shit in the first place.

It's very easy to mix everything up. The iPod and iPhone have very few buttons but they look expensive. They exude status. And they sell well with simplicity. And unfortuantely for our stress levels the Apples and 37signals of this world are few and far between.

Now Don Norman, I don't know. He may be amazing, he may be not. But I can't agree with this article, but mainly because I'm now tired of badly designed tech gear. Perhaps when he was writing this in 2006 that overcomplication fatigue hadn't started sinking into society.

But note the legions of adoring fans the Apples and 37signals have created. That's worth its weight in gold.

I prefer digital clocks as well, but a car adjusting for DST? That seems like a recipe for more complexity, not less. What happens when the DST rules change? Then, instead of manually adjusting the clock twice a year, you have to adjust it four times - once each time the automatic DST change occurs on the wrong date, and again each time to adjust it on the correct date.