The Laws of Simplicity summary

So now that we’ve seen why simplicity is an important characteristic for innovative products, how can we achieve this in product design?

The most direct path to simplicity is to remove functionality, i.e., decrease the number of things that your product can do. To do this successfully, you have to find the right balance between what’s necessary and what’s not.

As advances in technology make our lives increasingly complex, it becomes more and more important to reintroduce simplicity to your life wherever possible, including the way you manage your time. In order to prevent yourself from being overwhelmed by the huge amounts of information and responsibility that come with technology, it’s essential that you stay organized.

Proper organization starts with grouping and labeling your tasks. For example, if you want to plan out all your responsibilities for the week, you should first write down each task on a Post-it and then group them under a common theme. Doing so makes it easier to process a large amount of information by reorganizing that jumble of tasks into ordered information.

Everyone knows the feeling of being in a rush to finish their huge to-do lists. When this happens, everything seems overwhelmingly chaotic and complicated. However, the same to-do list can seem simple – and even fun – when you have plenty of time to get everything done.

In fact, having more time actually produces the feeling of simplicity. And while we can’t add more hours to the day, we can use our time more efficiently, thus leaving us more of it to spend elsewhere.

Have you ever had a great mentor or teacher? What was it that made them so great? It was most likely their ability to help you understand and do things on your own that you couldn’t before. Essentially, they helped make things easier for you: what used to be complicated became simple. So what’s the secret to being a good teacher?

While many teachers try to create motivation through rewards or punishment, i.e., positive and negative motivation, in reality, it is the style of teaching itself which fosters motivation. In order to motivate others to learn, follow these two rules:

Have you ever been at a restaurant and everything sounded so good that you couldn’t to decide what to get? Wouldn’t it be simpler if there were something or someone you trusted who could have made that decision for you?

Indeed, you can simplify your life by relinquishing control to someone or something you trust. If you trust that technology will work to your benefit, then you can hand over some of your responsibilities to it.

Imagine you’re sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office waiting for test results. The doctor comes into the waiting room and suddenly announces: “You have cancer,” then turns around and leaves to attend other patients, leaving you alone in the waiting room.

While this is certainly the quickest, simplest way of communicating your diagnosis, it’s obviously not the right one. This goes to show that pure simplicity is not always the best solution, especially when people’s emotional well-being is at stake!

As technology constantly changes and improves, its developments impact the way we understand and conceive simplicity.

For starters, technology is increasingly able to hide complicated processes so that we – the users – see only simplicity.

The key message in this book:

In a world full of complex technologies and products, it is simplicity that makes a product or service stand out. It’s therefore crucial that businesses understand how to balance complexity and simplicity, and can implement this understanding in their product designs.