Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design

Part 3. Four strategies for simplicity

Simplify this

Whenever I invite someone for a job interview as a designer, I ask them to show me how they’d take something that seems unnecessarily complicated and simplify it.

For a long time, I’ve been giving people the task of simplifying a DVD remote control, because most people have one at home and because, as we’ll see, it presents some tricky problems.

Typically, a DVD remote control has over forty buttons; many have more than fifty. That seems excessive for a device that’s used to play and pause movies.

When something is that complicated, there should be plenty of scope for simplifying it. But the task turns out to be harder than you’d imagine.

Try it now: you can refer to your own DVD remote or ...