The art of simplicity


The art of simplicity

Feature creep is everywhere. When all we want is something simple. Making something that is simple is hard, it’s much easier to make something complex. Today kids suffer from information overload from an early age. But in order to focus you need less information.

There is a running joke in the software community that when you add email to your app your product officially has feature creep.

Sometimes creating something complex at first and then making it simpler is good. Like this article. I threw everything i knew about simplicity in it, then I edited it and made it simpler. This gives you the opportunity to explore what is essential and what is not.

Other times making something complex and simplifying it is hard. If you create a complex app and then try to simplify it it will be really complicated to wrangle all the methods and variables to become simpler. The spagethi code is already all cobbled together and it wont unstick just like that. In this case starting with a simple product and then scaling it up would be easier.

There is also the saying: make it simple but no simpler.