Long ago, I recognized a pattern in my design efforts. It takes me many creations of workable solutions before arriving at what I consider an elegantly simple design. Most often, looking back at my first design, I can be harshly critical, as in: How could you be so stupid, or how could you think up something so backwards, or why did you make this so complicated? Then, the rationalization begins: Well, this IS the design process. Everyone designs this way. It surely isn’t that I am not as smart as I think I am. Maybe one of the traits of genius is coming up with an elegantly simple design the first time.

Finally, an Albert Einstein quote to the rescue: If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. See? I was right. Even a genius suffers the process of getting from ugly to elegant. Einstein probably devoted years, if not a lifetime, to ugly answers before finally coming up with E=mc2.

It seems almost embarrassing, admitting that I have spent about 10 years (in my defense—off and on) developing a management app for Serenity. This experience has really laid bare [to me], the long and ugly march to simplicity. But here we are. As my own beta tester, I am so pleased with how simple the user interface is, that it occurred to me that people will say, “What took you so long?”

Now it occurs to me that many people will ask, “Why spend so much time trying to make something simple when one of the not-so-simple solutions works just fine?” That’s a good question. It reminds me of the advice, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There’s a lot of wisdom there.

One reason to strive for simplicity is that you owe it to your users and humanity in general. Think of the websites that make a simple everyday task infuriatingly difficult.

Second, according to Einstein, if it isn’t simple, you may not understand the problem, and this will surely come back to bite you. 

In the real world away from writing code (and excluding the IRS tax code), there are many other opportunities for making things simple. After years of editorial submissions, Serenity has observed that writers are inclined to write in chronological order ending with the most important paragraph of their piece. Making things simple for the reader means placing paramount information in the first paragraph and then supporting that in the rest of the article. This not only benefits the reader but the writer as well.

And then there are contractors who want to make their job as complicated as possible. I think this is driven by their fear that if they make the project seem simple, the customer will say, “Oh, then I’ll just do it myself.” When, in reality, all the customer wants to hear is, “I’ll take care of that.”

Making things simple is not at all simple, but the effort is well worth it because it not only benefits the maker, but all of us.