Do we make things too complicated? Keeping things simple.

Yesterday I went shopping for a new phone for my home. Requirements: functional, not ugly, cordless, easy to use digital answering machine, reasonable price, reasonable battery life.

Before I went I read internet reviews and product specifications.

And I took the principal user (my wife) with me.

Once I identified the phones that met our overall requirements, the user made her decision based on 2 factors: simplicity of use and whether the numbers and buttons were big enough.

So Law 1 of John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity made sense to me: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

See also Presentations and the Laws of Simplicity