What makes an innovation successful? What makes it have great impact? What makes it so successful that we don’t even notice it’s ubiquity? One word: SIMPLICITY. No one seemed to understand this better in the last half-century than Charles Harrison. Charles Harrison is not exactly a household name. But you know him. Well, you know his products. But, the products he designed have become so ubiquitous that you probably don’t even think about them. Plastic garbage bins, the Fisher-Price View-Master, Craftsman power tools, lawn mowers, hair dryers, toasters…the list in practically endless. Harrison was an industrial product designer for the Sear Roebuck Company from 1961 to 1993. During that time he designed over 750 products that Americans and people worldwide came to know and use on a regular basis.
Harrison’s secret to his success was his adherence to a simple design axiom: “If it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do or look like what it does, then I frown on it. I don’t think a nutcracker needs to look like an elephant”. Harrison wanted to make things that fit in rather than stood out. And sometimes, that is what makes an innovation truly successful. When something is so easy to use or fits in with a workflow so well, you never even notice it…but you grow to the point where you can’t even think about it not being there. Take Harrison’s extremely innovative plastic garbage bin design, about which Harrison said in his book A Life’s Design , “When that can hit the market, it did so with the biggest bang you never heard. Everyone was using it, but few people paid close attention to it”. Think about it: When was the last time you used a metal garbage can?
So, whether you’re designing garbage bins, hair dryers, and toasters or the next generation of software or hardware, consider the words of Charles Harrison “If it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do or look like what it does, then I frown on it”. The next time you’re considering adding that little bell or whistle, think twice and consider if you really need it or not. In other words, make sure there is nothing superfluous about what you’re designing. Your users will thank you for it. Or even better yet, they won’t even notice it.
NOTE: Charles Harrison was recently honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
29 comments so far ↓
1 cspag (Chris Spagnuolo ?) // Jan 12, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Blogged: The Secret to Innovative Design is Simplicity: http://is.gd/fB0n
2 Roger Courville // Jan 13, 2009 at 10:47 am
“I would have written you a shorter letter if only I’d had the time.” – Mark Twain
3 Dave Lull // Jan 13, 2009 at 10:52 am
My thoughts are: yes, keep it simple. But the greatest of designs, product or web site or whatever, is the design that is simple, looks like what it’s supposed to do, and yet is attractive (or at least not un-attractive) as well. It’s not easy to go the extra step and make your product appealing to the general eye as well as correctly functional and obvious, and do that successfully. That is truly the ultimate goal of design: the full combination of functionality, usability and aesthetics.
4 Peter Watts // Jan 13, 2009 at 11:01 am
Absolutely agree Chris. It’s the same with public speakers, it’s the ones with the simplest message that get through to us. As soon as someone over-complicates their pitch, the message is lost.
http://speak2all.wordpress.com/
5 Mike Alber // Jan 13, 2009 at 11:37 am
Interesting post Chris. Harrison wasn’t on my radar before reading this, but just by glancing at the list of products he’s designed I can see that he really knows what he’s doing.
I’ll have to check out his book.
6 cspag (Chris Spagnuolo ?) // Jan 13, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Blogged: Innovative design is simple: http://is.gd/fB0n
7 Jade Cadelina // Jan 14, 2009 at 6:02 am
Twitthis is not posting. I posted this using twitthat.com to my Twitter account. Great article.
8 John Jan Popovic // Jan 14, 2009 at 8:49 am
My thoughts are: yes, keep it simple. But the greatest of designs, product or web site or whatever, is the design that is simple, looks like what it’s supposed to do, and yet is attractive (or at least not un-attractive) as well. It’s not easy to go the extra step and make your product appealing to the general eye as well as correctly functional and obvious, and do that successfully. That is truly the ultimate goal of design: the full combination of functionality, usability and aesthetics.
9 Bruno Tonetto A. Silva // Jan 14, 2009 at 9:17 am
This is a very important issue regarding IT. The problem is that while Harrison worked with “solid” inventions, IT deals with almost intangible things, where many softwares are called frameworks, platforms or even more abstract things like specifications. I think this explains a big deal of the lack of simplicity our industry suffers. A sounding example is EJB 1.0, where so much effort was employed, and afterwards completely abandoned in favor of a much simpler and pragmatic approach of Hibernate and EJB 3.0 (still much more complex than I wonder it could be
. Other examples are CORBA, COM+, SOAP, WS-*, BPEL, XPDL, BPMN, RUP, UML, and so on.
So, you are right… simplicity is the secret, but it is also a big challenge when dealing with IT abstractions.
10 Lady_VoIP // Jan 14, 2009 at 9:57 am
Our business model has always started with the phrase “simple, convenient, and time saving.” Certainly all these concepts should be integrated in design but in reading this its hard to disagree that simplicity is the corner stone.
11 Chad Foreman // Jan 14, 2009 at 10:51 am
That was a really good article. Thanks for sharing. And oh so true too. What an interesting comparison with innovation and the plastic garbage can. “When was the last time you used a metal garbage can?”
I liked how he designed things to fit in, not to stand out. That seems quite the contrary to some aspects of design, which is what makes it cool.
12 Larry Marine // Jan 14, 2009 at 11:02 am
While the article makes good points about simplicity, I think it leaves out one VERY important aspect of design innovation; that innovative products result from redefining the problem, well. So many products I see are solutions looking for a problem to solve. If you start by defining the problem more accurately, then the solutions become more obvious. Focus on the most appropriate solution for the problem often leads to more applicable innovation and simplicity is focus.
Without properly and accurately defining the problem, the best you can hope for is to design the wrong solution, very well.
13 cadelina (Jade Cadelina) // Jan 14, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Reading: “Innovative design is simple | EdgeHopper” ( http://tinyurl.com/8g4upl )
14 Adam Nedelman // Jan 14, 2009 at 2:53 pm
There is a book I read sometime back called, “Designing the Obvious” by Robert Hoekman Jr.. He has a good handle on this process, and the book carries excellent examples of (current) simple sites and applications that do it right. This should be required reading for any budding or seasoned designer.
http://rhjr.net/dto
15 Dan Saffer // Jan 15, 2009 at 8:54 am
This is, well, too simple. Products should be as simple as possible, but no less. Sometimes you need complexity, because with complexity often comes control, and users can sometimes want control.
Cameras are a perfect example of this. You could make every camera a simple point-and-shoot. But where does that leave expert users who want more control? You have to keep some of the complexity behind taking pictures for them so that they can get the effects they are after.
Simplicity is nice to strive for, but it’s not the end-all, be-all of design.
16 Robert Gomes // Jan 15, 2009 at 9:02 am
I think we can all agree with Chris that a simple solution to a complex problem is always welcome and preferred.
I like Dan’s analogy of the Point-and-shot scenario. Yes common tasks should be obvious and simple to accomplish and shouldn’t stress the common user. But there is always advanced users, power users, and Admin’s that have complex needs beyond the basic user, and that changes everything.
When designing against extremely complex and task oriented flows, one might be faced with limited flexibility, especially when working within existing architectures. Look at banks, insurance, any enterprise level application. The simple solution / design might be achieved without sacrificing functionality only when we truly, as in Larry’s comment “Define the problem more accurately “. Understand the issues the software or products are experiencing.
My my point is, it’s nice to preach simplicity, it’s nice to quote someone who wrote a usability or design book telling us to keep it simple, and that is great and we should all strive to achieve this goal. But the truth is that some things will never be simple, some applications are intended to solve complex problems and we might be stuck with a complex UI and we do our best to make it simple.
Find out what your users need, want, and would like to have. Then jump into a real project, with limited resources, limited budgets, real world issues and problems, having to deal with various team dynamics, like offshore development teams with different processed and development models. Then build the thing, and monitor the results. I think it’s all about a BALANCED solution. BALANCED might be a more appropriate statement to our simplicity question.
Anyway, we all have our own views based on our own experiences in the field. This is a great forum to express ideas
. It inspires me to read some of your comments, you all have a great day.
Robert Gomes
User Experience Architect
OANDA
17 Micah Boswell // Jan 15, 2009 at 9:56 am
I don’t think anyone starts out by saying to themselves, “I want to create a complicated interface.” Most of us begin the process with at least an unspoken assumption that our solution will be ‘better’ and this almost always is synonymous with simple.
Having the time and commitment to define simplicity is critical. To me, that means checking my assumptions on what ’simple’ means at the door, and putting on my user hat. What is the context of the user’s experience, and how might they best define ’simple’? To many of you who’ve been in the field for a long time, this process might be intuitive, and I defer to you on the details of this experience.
Contextual design can lead to fantastically elegant solutions, but for me, it requires the ability to step away from the ideology of design, and look at things empathically, from the user’s perspective.
I once designed an interface with a strong color coding system that I had assumed would be a very effective method of helping a set of small laboratories in North Carolina. There was some resistance to it in user-testing, and there was a valid explanation. In all of the labs, all of the other interfaces being used were gray monotone and the task cues were all shape-based. These were all disparate machines and interfaces that were not on the docket for a re-design. So, here I come with a bright and colorful interface, and the task of my interfaced application was actually a minor sub-task in any lab personnel’s daily task set. You can imagine moving from one gray, shape-based task set to another…when all of a sudden, you happen on a new logic for a minor task-set. Mental switch. Then back to the gray shape-based task set. So, was it simple for me? Yes. Was I following all of the best-in-class design standards and principles? Yes. Was it the simplest and most innovative for the user, contextually speaking? Absolutely not.
The willingness to innovate on behalf of a simple result can be a complex process, because it means that one has to literally step out of their own skin and into the skin of stakeholders.
I’ve learned this the hard way.
18 Alina Barbuceanu // Jan 15, 2009 at 11:14 am
What is very interesting is that this post was followed by so many comments.
Isn’t “Don’t make me think” from Steve Krug a classic and a widely accepted theory already?
19 Scott Pobiner // Jan 15, 2009 at 3:58 pm
It is a classic but I wouldn’t necessarily consider wide acceptance to be the same as universal. Krug’s argument is a response to the overindulgence on needlessly complex interfaces in terms of having to interact with them.
I will grant Chris this – Harrison is a great designer and as an industrial designer he is in a class of his own. But as someone who designs products he is clearly in the business of making things seem simple. Even by today’s standards that AM/FM radio (beautiful as it may be) is more complicated than it needs to be to function.
But this is a UX discussion and it is a bit frustrating to see a discussion on the topic approach any overarching methodology without first identifying the user (actually I prefer stakeholders). I would hesitate to make any assumptions without having a relatively well understood set of stakeholders. That in itself is complex rather than simple.
That said, I think simplicity, complexity, and everything in between is kind of irrelevant and has the potential to be dangerously dogmatic.
The same should go for Innovative Design. Innovation has precedents and antecedents that can be identified – not secret. This too is complex and not simple. Ask any 10 ‘design innovators’ what innovation is and I would argue that there is little chance that a common methodology can be gleaned. Furthermore – you won’t get ’simplicity’ from many of them.
Interesting discussion! Thanks all.
20 Korosh Shetabi // Jan 15, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Adam,
If you liked the “Designing the Obvious” by Robert Hoekman Jr then you would like his latest book “Designing the moment”. I have that book and I enjoyed reading it..
21 Jason Buck // Jan 16, 2009 at 6:23 am
‘Ockham’s razor’. Nuff said.
22 Kyle Johnson // Jan 16, 2009 at 9:01 am
I recently heard someone speak on “Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises” and he basically said to break up the software to chunks to make it simplier to understand. Simplicity – In – Design unleashed! The man was Roger Sessions. You might want to Google him.
23 Jim Gettman // Jan 16, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Regarding simplicity and IT frameworks – the entire alphabet soup of frameworks, middleware and other abstractions promulgated by many IT people are NOT NEEDED, and as such, they are an EXPENSIVE DEADWEIGHT.
=========OK, this got rather long, feel free to skip ahead
One of my employers, Ropak Corp., ran US and Canadian operations on a single ERP package (BAAN) supplemented by HR functions from a service provider. Business transactions, accounting and reporting for 10 plants ran on 1 UNIX mainframe. I have replaced 4 applications with TWiki ( http://www.twiki.org ). It does everything that Perforce, Jira, Lotus Quickplace, and MS-Sharepoint do, does them better, and is free.
So, why do IT people build crown jewels of expertise? Don’t they see the massive deadweight on the businesses that support them? Of course not, for they are paid handsomely, and are supported by a cabal of ‘independent’ agencies (Gartner Group, et al.) and trade magazines that shill for advertisers. This is quite like egotistic CEOs building fragile empires through M&A while being supported by the corrupt compensation consultants and hand-picked committees.
Meanwhile, pluggers that ignore fads like Business Intelligence and prefer to find diamonds in the rough and use them to build lasting and useful IT through good processes and people don’t make the news. This problem is fueled by the focus on hiring people with hot skills, as if any given programming language or software application cannot possibly be mastered in a few months. A learning curve is not viable because the lifespan of software fads has become so short.
This is not a case for or against any one vendor or fad. I am completely convinced that most any package can be made to perform its intended purpose with enough work.
==========Here’s the bottom line
Rather, this is a call for business people to focus on the people and systems that make their companies competitive, and to insist on getting long-term value from their IT departments. You will know this is happening when your CIO stops frantic searches for people with 3 years experience in technology that has only been widely used for 3 years. That’s just dumb. Yes, the emperor has no clothes.
24 Dinesh Ganesan // Jan 16, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Well! SIMPLICITY works when it comes to Consumer Software Products. But in information service, that is not the magic word.
25 Jane Prusakova // Jan 17, 2009 at 11:24 am
John Jan Popovic, another popular example of winning simplicity is the Google search page.
The UI should be simple. The software & IT infrastructure might not be simple, but it’s best when they are as-simple-as-possible, given the requirements. Simple works best for stable operation, maintenance, scalability, support, and future development.
However, simple is not easy. Both UI designers and IT specialists usually prefer complicated over simple. Being able to pull off a complicated design or implementation makes people proud and gives them something to show off. Doing things as simple as possible gives competitive power and business value to the ultimate owner of the product, but little bragging rights or even appreciation to the creator.
26 Suzanne MarcAurele // Jan 19, 2009 at 4:33 pm
You might want to add to that utility. I find most software is not intuitive, that web sites are hopelessly circular and frustrating. I am sick of visual assaults that are short on content that I can use and presumptive, that because I have no choice, that I choose their venue. Nothing in computing is simple, the key is to create the logical – which appears simple but is not underneath it all. More directly put, think like the user, not like the programmer and then create the program. Understand my requirements, not yours, not the requirements of the language. If software is to provide what we need, what its utility will be is the first consideration and that means knowing your users. By the way some of us get very testy when it does not do what we want. This is one business owner’s view -
27 Dan Saffer // Jan 19, 2009 at 9:53 pm
“When you start looking at a problem, and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too simplified 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 sort of the middle, and it’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep on going and find, sort of, the key underlying principle of the problem. And come up with an beautiful elegant solution that works.”
Steve Jobs
http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2008/12/review-the-perfect-thing/
28 Nadine Schaeffer // Jan 19, 2009 at 10:27 pm
I am going to chime in here and say simplicity is a nice goal, but only one of several components integral to great design. To plagiarize from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, I would add mobility, interoperability and adaptability as equally important. Sadly, I see “simplicity” all too often used as a cover for lazy design where all the complexity and conflicting use cases are just swept under a very nice, aesthetically pleasing and minimal carpet.
29 John Judy // Jan 20, 2009 at 8:07 pm
My approach has been to try and take the necessary complex functions and elements and organize them in such a way that it is simpler to comprehend and interact with. Sometimes we can’t remove features, we just need to think about how best to present them.
PS – love the Steve Job’s quote
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