In one of my posts in the Thoughts and links section I said I would write something about this book by John Maeda, a graphic designer, computer scientist and MIT professor. I bought it after watching the author’s talk on simplicity patterns at the TED website (also embedded at the bottom of this post).

In his book, John Maeda introduces great techniques to achieve simplicity. The examples that are used in the book are easily connected to things we know in life or work so it gives you some warm surprises when you read it. We are constantly thinking how we can make our life and what we do more simple and the techniques in this book can be applied to those thoughts right away.

A book about simplicity has to be simple and this one clearly is with few exceptions I mention later on. It’s short, on point and consists of 10 laws. What’s furthermore, is that the author offers a simpler way of reading the book:

If you wish to save time (in accordance with the third Law of TIME)”, I suggest you start with basic simplicity (1 to 3) and then skip to the tenth Law of THE ONE which sums up the entire set.

The first law, reduce, is about achieving simplicity through thoughtful reduction. That is finding the balance between how simple you can make something and how complex it has to be. The second law, organize, addresses how to make a system of many appear fewer by organizing it and the third law, TIME, is about how savings in time feel like simplicity.

Let’s break it down by its own medicine - simplicity.

The simple and enjoyable

• The length - 100 pages
• Great techniques of how to achieve simplicity
• Well organized
• Maeda’s writing is warm and personal so you get the feeling that he’s sitting next to you and you’re having a conversation.

Quotes:

“What program do you use?” is a question I often get about the slides I use to present my work. I have concluded that the proper answer to the question is to counter-suggest the asking of a different question, “What principle do you use?”

Sometimes mixing actual and perceived qualities works well, like in the design of the Bang & Olufsen remote control. The unit is thin and slender in composition and made with the finest materials, but is significantly (and intentionally) heavier - as a means to subtly communicate higher quality - than you would expect from its appearance.

The not so simple

• The book cover - judge for yourself! Do you think the swirly images on the front cover and the lines under the text on the back cover are appropriate for a book on simplicity? I personally threw the cover away and I think the book looks a lot better (and more simple) without it as you can see in the second image.

• The book uses acronyms, which are not easy to remember, introduced in the beginning chapters and then constantly referred to in other chapters. I found myself having to go back to the page where they were introduced because I couldn’t remember exactly what each stood for.

Otherwise, great!

The book doesn’t go into much details in how exactly you should use the techniques introduced but it helps you understand what simplicity consists of and gives you a good direction if you’re interested in digging deeper. At the end of the book there is a list of books that inspired the author when he was writing each chapter. I’ve already decided to read one of them, a book which I bought few months ago but haven’t had the time to read it until now - The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz.

Barry Schwartz talks: TED (20 min), Google (64 min).

When I read this book I had the feeling everyone recognizes. It’s the feeling where you’ve been thinking a lot about something but you haven’t been able to think it through or sort it out. Then you read a book about it and suddenly you realize that’s exactly what you had been wondering about, but there it is - complete and printed on a paper. It brings order to your thoughts and organizes them.

Essential reading for everyone who wants to achieve simplicity in design, business, technology and life!

Buy this book on Amazon.

Maeda’s talk on the TED conference

Usability is all about helping users to find what they’re looking for and if they get lost tell them where they are and provide them with an easy way of browsing to another page.

You can look at search engine crawlers as primitive users going from page to page asking the same questions again and again: “where am I?”, “what is this page about?”, “what is the most important part of this page?”, “I’m not interested, can you show me to the next page?”. Basically the same questions a user who is lost is asking himself.

So what are the main factors in SEO and usabiliy?

Headings

The most obvious usability factor is telling the user where he is and what the page he is looking at is all about. The same goes by with search engine crawlers, they look for headings when determining how to index a page. A search engine crawler looks for heading tags (h1,h2,h3…) which is great for usability because web developers tend to use regular sized bold text as headings resulting in a layout with no visual hierarchy - total flatness.

Page description

A short text describing what you can find at a certain page and how to use it can be very helpful for users if they’re confused. I am not talking about meta description here but a text that’s visible to the user. The same text can of course and should be used for the meta description tag. Visible page description is also a good place to put keywords which don’t belong in the heading, title tag or url but you want to rank under in search engines. This sort of description can however easily get out of hand if it’s too long and should not be used if unnecessary - if the user interface is so simple it doesn’t need a description, don’t do one! It can look as ridiculous if Google would put a yellow box on it’s search engine saying “This is the Google search engine. If you would like to search, enter what you’re searching for in the input box and press the Google Search button”.

Title tags

Title tags are one of the main factors when search engines determine what the most important part of a certain page is. It is also a huge factor when it comes to usability. When bookmarking a page, the title tag is used for it’s name in the bookmarks. Do you love tabbed browsing? What is more annoying than having 10 tabs open with multiple pages from the same website and all of them have a title like “The Website”? Title tags should describe in few words what the page is about

Readable and information rich URLs

URLs are also one of the main factor when search engines determine what a page is about. So if you’re hoping to rank under a certain keyword, put your keyword in the URL and throw away symbols like ?=&. Simple readable URLs are also a lot easier to remember and enter so they play a big role in both SEO and usability.

I didn’t realize how super convenient readable and information rich URLs were until we started using them for news stories at mbl.is. The url for a news story is now constructed like this:

http://mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/2008/02/02/mbl_is_a_afmaeli_i_dag/

After the mm, which is there because of technical reasons (yeah I know - don’t ask), comes /news/category/year/month/day/headline/.

The URL tells you that the news story is filed under the category innlent (local news), it’s written in February 2nd, 2008 and is about mbl’s 10th anniversary. People are always posting links to you through through email, msn etc. and with a information rich URL like that you can quickly determine what the page is about and in this case when it was published before even clicking on the link!

Some people say date in URLs don’t matter in SEO but I strongly disagree. When searching for information in search engines it is always good to see when a page was published. Also when a search string contains a date, you are not only more likely to rank better for that search term but users are more likely to click on your page in the results if he sees that your page is written on the date they were searching for.

An eye tracking study on search engines conducted by Microsoft supports this. It shows that people are in fact using URLs a lot in search engine results when deciding whether to click on a page or not.

The more activity there is on your forum, the less work it is to maintain it. Another thing that happens when your customers start to interact is that they build up a relationship, not only with you and your product, but also with each other. They exchange experience and ideas regarding the use of your service or product and you actually start to build a brand community.

I think the best living example of this is Apple. Apple has managed to create a great customer community where the customers don’t just help each other with problems but even become the strongest marketeers of their brand.

Saving huge amount of money on customer support and having thousands of people doing free marketing for you. Can you ask for more?

Enough said. Here are 3 of those VW ads:

Starring Heidi Klum

Starring David Hasselhof

Starring a NASA astronaut