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March 26, 2006

The Art of Simple Complexity

My column in the current Business 2.0 is on the seemingly discredited art of simple complexity. Too many product designers are learning the wrong lesson from the iPod, and creating a false compromise between a rich feature set and an austere interface. In the "more is more" versus "less is more" debate, I affirmedly come down in favor of the former.

With the preceding in mind, Edward Tenner has a column in today's New York Times arguing (meanderingly) that an inability to do anything but simple searches at sites like Google is making students stupid. Bring on the simple complexity:

Google can do more to educate users about the power -- and frequent advisability -- of its advanced search options. It would be a shame if brilliant technology were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that produced
it.

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