Simple design is not simple

I recently read the book "Simplicity first ".ArticleTo sum up. Recommended to kids shoes interested in interactive design.

Simple syntax

First, people like simple, trustworthy, and adaptive products. Therefore, we are dedicated to designing simple products.

Reasons why people like simple products include:

1. The more features the product has, the more difficult it is to find new features that are truly valuable to users.

2. The increased complexity makes it difficult for them to find the functions they really need. The thought of paying for so many useless features makes them unhappy.

However, the simplicity of users does not mean that our technology or management is simple. Simple technology or management may not necessarily create a simple user experience. Just look at Google. They need to hire thousands of people behind the scenes to make search simple. Therefore, simple design is not simple at all.

Simple Design

First, we must realize that we are designing simple experiences for mainstream users, rather than expert users. There are three types of users:

1. expert users: expert users are willing to explore your products or services. These users account for a minority of the total.

2. Random users: Random users may have used similar products or services and are interested in using more complex products. However, they are reluctant to access brand new products unless new features are simple enough. There are few such users.

3. Mainstream users: Mainstream users are the largest groups. They use products to complete tasks, and they will never have the idea of learning all functions. "My cell phone only needs to be able to call or send text messages ".

For the above three users, we should ignore expert users. Experts are not typical users. They are most interested in functions that mainstream users do not care about. Their opinions will make the product more and more complex. We should design products for mainstream interuse.

2. We need to go out of the office, observe users in the software environment, and understand users.

1. What will happen in the office?

2. What will happen at home?

3. What will happen outdoors?

3. We will organize the materials collected from users into stories and use them to describe users' health checks.

1. trusted environment: time and place.

2. Trusted roles: who and why.

3. Smooth plot: What.

4. Find the breakthrough points in the design from the story and list the key points of the design.

5. Sort these design points in order, which of the following factors has the greatest impact. Which is easy to change.

6. Verify your opinions

Four simple design strategies:

Four strategies in the simple design process.

1. Delete

2. Organization

3. Hide

4. Transfer

Understand four strategies and design a DVD remote control.

1. Delete: Remove unnecessary buttons until they cannot be deleted.

2. Organization: groups buttons Based on meaningful criteria.

3. Hide: place the buttons that are not the most important in the event warehouse to avoid users' attention.

4. Transfer: retain the most basic function buttons on the remote control and transfer other controls to the menu force on the TV screen to transfer the complexity of the remote control to the TV.

To sum up, it is unnecessary to delete the non-core ones that organizations should provide to users, hide the non-core ones, and transfer the complexity to the appropriate ones.

Summary:For us, simple user experience is not simple. Instead, we leave simplicity to users and complexity to ourselves. I think this is the most important principle of this book. Simple design is not simple at all.