A steady drumbeat has started to find the successor to “Agility”, a now somewhat aging fad in software development circles. My current prediction is that today’s “Agility” will become tomorrow’s “Simplicity”. I may be wrong, but even if I am, there is an underlying aesthetic to both Agility and Simplicity that will never go away. And that is a good thing.
Louis Armstrong said that there are two kinds of music, bad music and good music. Good music is the kind you like, and bad music is the kind you don’t like. He was dead on. Agility and Simplicity are both about being human centered, user-centered or customer-centered. It is about making whatever is in front of the green curtain easy to comprehend for the human that wants to comprehend it. It is a variation on “the customer is always right”.
I like to tell people, it is easy to do a complicated design, and hard to do a simple one. Complicated designs accumulate, simple ones must constantly be re-worked to remove excessive, useless or cumbersome functionality. Simple forces us to make as many choices about what will be removed from a design as we make about what to add to a design.
Underlying these fads, like Agility, is a reality that all who design, write and make products need to pay attention to. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to tell you what the purveyors of the latest fad will tell you: that this is all New. Nope, simplicity is as old as dirt. What is significant about the demand for Agility or Simplicity, is that it is about humans: our users, our customers and ourselves.
My theory about this is as our environments get crowded, it gets harder to hear the other voices in our heads trying to grab our attention. Our inner dialog gets drowned by the outer. Interruptions from devices, media and tools in our environment feel increasingly like they are driving us. Our time gets cut into smaller and smaller pieces that are harder and harder to fit our selves into.
Like all good fads there is a bunch of stuff advocating Simplicity on the Internet and more appearing each day. I put a small sampling here:
- Wabi-Sabi
- TED: David Pogue – Simplicty Sells
- TED: John Maeda: The Simple Life
- Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster
As the Simplicity movement ramps up, we don’t need to forget Agility. All these fads and movements are doing is re-centering our technology more around us rather than on top of us. Simplicity is as old as society itself. We humans generate a lot of noise. We are primates after all. A bit on the loud side. It is natural that our technology has taken over a bit. It will be easy to design ourselves back to the aesthetics we enjoy the most, and always have enjoyed: the aesthetics that cater to our own minds first.
