There's a lot of talk recently touting the benefits of minimalism and simplification. Since we've just made it through the consumer-mania of Singles Day here in China, I've been reflecting on when and how simplicity can benefit us, as well as our responsibility as the creators of the digital experiences that are often used to fuel consumerism.
As we've seen in many forms in the last decade, choice is not always a good thing. I'm constantly surprised by the number of experienced business professionals who believe the best way to add value to their customers' lives is to provide a product that is more flexible than the competition. This couldn't be further from the truth.
To illustrate the value of less choice, consider...
Anyone who’s dabbled in audio production has come across an equalizer: an essential music production tool that allows engineers to control the loudness of specific parts of a sound without affecting other parts.
Equalizers have been around in various forms since the early part of the 20th century, and they've been used on audio recordings from the late 1960s on.
In 1967, legendary audio pioneer Saul Walker changed the course of audio engineering forever when he created a new kind of equalizer, the 550A (which, in case you're wondering, is still being sold today).
What was so special about Walker's 550A equalizer? Like other equalizers on the market, Walker’s 550A allowed audio engineers to control the loudness of specific parts of the signal. But unlike its peers, Walker's design used a slightly different layout which offered less control to the user.
Less control? That's right. Whereas most of the other equalizers at the time allowed the engineer to control both gain and bandwidth of the signal, Walker’s 550A offered only one setting: gain. The bandwidth control? Gone completely.
The actual technical funtionality of the bandwidth and gain settings are not relevant here—what's notable is the fact that Walker's design offered less control over the equalizer's behavior than its competitors. In fact, the 550A's circuitry had a curious side effect of adjusting the bandwidth on its own depending a variety of factors, including factors that weren't entirely clear to the engineer fiddling with the knobs. No doubt, Walker's shamelessly simplistic equalizer design initially lead seasoned audio engineers roll their eyes—until they tried it.
Somehow, Walker’s 550A seemed to just always sound … right. Fiddle with the gain knob on Walker's equalizer, and the music just begins to shine through. It provided the perfect amount of shimmery sparkling clarity. The perfectly punchy bass. What about bandwidth? Well, the engineers said, bandwidth is important but … who cares? Walker's 550A just seemed to deliver the right sound. A sound that was highly appealing and musical.
Walker's bandwidth-less design posed an interesting quandary to industry experts, a quandary that continues to permeate product design to this day. On the surface, Walker’s 550A was less powerful and offered less precise control than its competitors. But as it turns out, engineers were not looking for more precise audio controls—they were looking for ways to make their clients’ music sound great. Walker’s design made that task dead simple. The bandwidth control was missing, and it didn't matter. Somehow, this equalizer always just sounded great.
Complexity was at play, but the complexity was taking place within the bowels of Walker's groundbreaking circuitry. By doing away with the bandwidth setting and leaving it to the circuit to automatically determine the bandwidth, Walker's user-facing control panel simply did not allow for configurations that yield non-musical results. Other equalizers provided more technical control, but the problem users were trying to solve was not technical: it was musical.
A few years ago, Apple released a major update to their flagship Logic Pro audio production software. In a move to lure casual GarageBand hobbyists into the world of professional audio, Apple started hiding some of the more advanced features in Logic’s UI unless a series advanced settings were explicitly enabled by the user.
Pro users were taken aback. (Where did the xxx control go? It used to be right next to the knob for adjusting yyy thing, above the control for zzz… now I see none of those things 😠)
Fear not, Apple told us. Advanced users need only follow these simple instructions to enable “Advanced tools”, and then you'll be be free to carry on with using the same advanced tools as in previous versions of Logic.
At first glance, this might seem like a straightforward business move on Apple’s part. Pro users know exactly what settings they’re looking for—and if they can’t find a control they need right away, they’ll look it up. Entry level users are different: a newbie that finds themselves confronted with an overwhelming interface might not know where to start, and they might not even know what to look up, or what questions to ask. The consequences of a stranded amateur user are severe, because if an entry level user feels overwhelmed and confused then there’s a real risk they might give up before they’ve even gotten their feet wet.
As a professional user myself, I initially found Apple’s change to be quite annoying. Whereas I used to be able to get started with a plethora of tools at my fingertips right away, now I had to pause my workflow on several occasions because I couldn't find the control parameter that I needed, only to then learn that it had been buried underneath the “Advanced” carrot ticker, visible only when “Advanced” mode had been enabled for that feature set. I gradually began toggling on the advanced settings that I needed, but in doing so, I discovered a subtle yet critical detail in the simplified interface that Apple had implemented.
Apple had not only hidden a variety of controls for new users—they had also added a few new controls in their place, controls with highly ambiguous labels. The difference between their “advanced” UI and their “non-advanced” UI was particularly stark when viewing the Compressor module, on which Apple had hidden several technical controls (Threshold, Attack, Release, & Knee) and replaced them with a single master knob with the ambiguous label “Amount.”
Amount? What does that mean? I decided to spin the ambiguously-labeled "Amount" knob to find out.
The answer, coincidentally, was that adjusting the Amount resulted in all the “Advanced” controls moving themselves in tandem depending on what “Amount” I dialed in using the single control.
Apple was pulling off the digital equivalent of what Walker had accomplished 50 years earlier with the 550A equalizer—they simplified a series of highly technical decisions (i.e. "What would you like the Threshold of your compressor to be?") to a single musical decision: “How much of this effect would you like to add to your music?”
Apple had not removed the Threshold, Attack, Release, & Knee controls—they had simply automated their behavior into a single musical "Amount" parameter. When you set the Amount of compression high, it sounded … more compressed. And when you lowered the control, it sounded … less compressed.
They didn’t remove the detailed technical parameters outright; they guided users toward a single control for using the component effectively in a musical way and with minimal thought.
As product design tools have evolved, it’s now easier than ever to add controls—and the temptation to do so is great.
When working with clients, I frequently hear something along the lines of this: “Well our system supports controlling xxx parameter, so there’s no harm in letting our end users control it. It can only help. It makes our product more flexible.”
This couldn't be further from the truth.
Adding any sort of control parameter to a digital system is an inherent risk. It introduces new opportunities for failure, and most importantly—it opens up the door for users to get confused and frustrated about why the new control isn’t creating the result they wanted.
More controls (and more choices in general) are not necessarily better. Oftentimes, complex interfaces are quite a bit worse than their simpler alternatives.
Don’t let users wonder which thing to click—unless that decision is crucial to helping them achieve their goal.
Sometimes complexity is necessary, but complexity should be added with caution. Be prudent with choosing which parameters the user is allowed to control. Control should be offered only in places where the user's judgement or creative input is required to yield the desired result.
When things start to become too complex, take a page from Walker and his 550A—see if there's a way to provide less control while still letting users achieve their goal. An effective product offers precisely the amount of control that users need to meet their goal—and not an ounce more.