[IxDA Discuss] John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity

[jackbellis.com]

Dave,
There's nothing incorrect about his laws, but usability folks ranting for simplicity is like politicians promising lower taxes as the solution to all the world's problems. I'm tired of both.

None of us, myself included, would argue that between two interface solutions to the same design challenge, the simpler one is better. The same holds for writing, engineering, code, you name it. But that is not the issue. Complexity, even when we have to learn detailed interfaces to access it, is the source of all of our technological pleasures. I'll bore you with only one example, cell phones. Complain all you want if you feel the interface to your phone is flawed... to me, I have incredible power in my hand. And to do this, my phone has not the 12 push buttons that sufficed for phones of the 80's but 28 buttons, some of which can be pressed multiple ways. Maeda almost makes my point in his fifth law, which to me relegates his theme to mere marketing. 

Simplicity is not a path to solving usability problems. Completing the code is. Automating multi-step processes is. Fault tolerance is. Explicitness, accuracy, and precision are. And increasing the learnability at the same rate that we add features most assuredly is.

www.jackBellis.com, 
www.UsabilityInstitute.com
www.WorkAtHomeWednesday.com
www.SelfishMoralism.com

http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/
John Maeda's blog on Simplicity ... but more is being done at his book 
blog at http://lawsofsimplicity.com/
Oh! I came across all this reading a silly article in Wired. the article 
Here are the Laws: http://lawsofsimplicity.com/?cat=5&order=ASC

What do people think?

-- dave