simplicity & complexity

Jared M. Spool
@jmspool
Before you can design for simplicity, you need to become immersed in the complexity.

11:08am · 14 Apr 13 · Twitter for iPhone

Peter Merholz
@peterme
@jmspool Sounds like the Steve Jobs quote (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_stevejobs/), search for: "Fruit, an apple".

11:37am · 14 Apr 13 · TweetDeck

Even back then, Jobs described Apple in the terms he would use repeatedly over the years, as “an intersection between science and aesthetics.” When I suggested that he seemed to be striving for an almost Zen-like simplicity in his designs, he agreed, mentioning an early brochure with a single image of an apple against a white background.

“Fruit, an apple,” he said. “That simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When you start looking at a problem, it seems really simple—because you don’t understand its complexity. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works. And that’s what we wanted to do with Mac.”

Twitter and Steven Levy, "The Revolution According to Steve Jobs," Wired, 29 Nov 2011,
www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_stevejobs/.

Creativity means that you try something new

Though absolutely harmonious with the studio's overall filmmaking values, [The Incredibles] was quite unlike the movies Pixar had made before—and that, as Catmull explained, was exactly the point. "We need to have variability, and we need to have people with different ideas. You can't keep repeating the old things. By definition, creativity means thay you try something new."

Karen Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, Chronicle Books, 2007, p 249.

wrestling a vision into existence

In addition to the problems every filmmaker faces in wrestling a vision into existence, Docter was facing a web of pressures highly unusual fo a first-time director.

Karen Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, Chronicle Books, 2007, p 186.

I just really like this description of the creative process - "wrestling a vision into existence." Io Infinity and Beyond is a great read about the creative process behind a movie and a company.

240 billion photos

DATA POINT: 240 BILLION

"In January, Facebook announced that it has 240 billion photos total. With Instagram, there are 40 million photos uploaded every day. Photos are becoming the default of communication."

- Loren Appin, director of growth, Pixable, an application that personalizes the photo-sharing experience

"Gannett, Airbnb, Pixable Weigh In On The Value Of Visual," Fast Company, 18 Mar 2013, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/174/gannett-airbnb-pixable.

The question

...the question we are called on to answer is no longer primarily, “can it be built?”, but rather, “should it be built?”

Ash Maurya, Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, O'Reilly Media, 2012.

gain this confidence

Bandura calls this process "guided mastery." I love that term: guided mastery. And something else happened, these people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. They just gained a new confidence. And Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy -- the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do.

....

I really believe that when people gain this confidence -- and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO -- they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives. We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. We see them come up with more interesting, and just more, ideas so they can choose from better ideas. And they just make better decisions.

David Kelley, "How to build your creative confidence," TED 2012,
www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence.html.

the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers

The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system -- all the species, all the links -- and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most. And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees. So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with.

Eric Berlow, "Simplifying complexity," TEDGlobal 2010, Jul 2010,
www.ted.com/talks/eric_berlow_how_complexity_leads_to_simplicity.html.

We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.

With the rise of the product designer, there’s a simultaneous progression and regression in digital experiences. Using Jesse’s 12-year-old diagram (!) as a framework, we’re seeing the top two planes getting tastier and more interesting — look at Path, Square, AirBNB. Luscious full-bleed high-design screens where it’s clear that designers obsessed over every pixel and element of movement. But in that middle plane, digital experiences suffer from a lack of attention to flows, taxonomies, relationships between content areas, etc. (Any attempt to navigate Path turns into a trip down the rabbit hole.)  We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.

Peter Merholz, “'Product designers' and design team evolution," peterme.com, 31 Oct 2012, www.peterme.com/2012/10/31/product-designers-and-design-team-evolution/.

getting out of the building

... Lean UX is an approach that quickly followed the lean startup movement. It is not a new thing. It’s just a new name for things that were always around. The difference is in the packaging of these ideas.

One other factor that has changed dramatically is the audience. Entrepreneurs and startup founders have always been asking themselves how to develop great products. The answer that UX practitioners, usability professionals and UX researchers have been giving them was too complicated. UX people (me included) have been using disastrous jargon that only we understand. We have been talking about usability tests, personas, field studies and areas of interest in eye-tracking studies.

The lean startup answer to the same question uses plain language that people understand. When I say, “We need to conduct a contextual inquiry,” I usually get a deer-in-the-headlights reaction. When a lean startup person says they are “getting out of the building,” it is a whole different story. We mean the same thing; we use different words.

Tomer Sharon, "Lean Startup Is Great UX Packaging," Smashing Magazine, 10 Oct 2012, uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/10/10/lean-startup-is-great-ux-packaging.

The Obscure Features Hypothesis

The Obscure Features Hypothesis approach to innovation articulates the many ways that our neural system automatically generates meaning and then constructs counter techniques to uncover what is overlooked. Once the obscure is unearthed, then innovation is not far away. Innovation is putting the obscure to work for something useful.

Tony McCaffrey, "Why We Can't See What's Right in Front of Us," HBR Blog Network, 10 May 2012,
blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/overcoming_functional_fixednes.html