The document provides 10 guidelines for creating simple product architecture, including removing seldom-used features to reduce complexity, shortening the number of steps to access features, providing fewer options to avoid overwhelming users, using intuitive icons, anticipating and addressing user fears, controlling where users' attention is directed, embracing constraints to drive creativity, guessing what features users will want and making products self-teaching through contextual use and feedback. Following these guidelines can result in products that are faster to build, easier to modify, and simpler for both users and developers.

1. Simple
10 Guidelines for Simple Product Architecture
rubin
30 May 2013

2. Remove Features
Used 90% of the
time
Used 2% of the
time
Features that are used by a few (or very
rarely) are a tax.
Nothing is purely additive unless everyone uses it: If there's
an affordance to use a feature, the affordance is a
distraction to everyone, while the positive value accrues
only to the users and potential users. The net value of a
feature is the value to the users of the feature, divided by
the distraction of the affordance to everyone. [A seldom
used feature] ends up being used by such a tiny fraction of
users (sub 1%), that it can't possibly pay for its cost.
( Neil Hunt, CTO Netflix)

3. Shorten the Funnel
Every click to reach a feature narrows
the quantity of users significantly
A case could be made that if a feature cannot be reached in
fewer than 2 steps it should be removed.

4. Fewer Options
People report wanting options and choices, but behavior demonstrates
the opposite: people prefer not to have to make decisions and express
preferences.
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about
what will make us happy are wrong.

5. Iconography = Work
Once you know what an icon means,
it’s an excellent short-hand that
reduces text and clutter. But most
iconography, particularly for
beginners, does the opposite – a set of
hieroglyphics that is WORK to
decipher.

6. Guess What Users Want
Really good automatic processes and
well-selected preferences not only
make a product SIMPLE, but make its
use feel like MAGIC.
At any given instant of use, the range of options is
probably not the universe of features, but rather
a very narrow subset. Guess.

7. Anticipate Fear
For many users, unless they are very
certain what a button does, they do
not “explore” – they are paralyzed in
fear.
Fear of:
screwing up,
breaking it,
looking stupid
deleting something,
exposing themselves,
losing data,
getting lost…
Chose One

8. Control Attention
Using lighting, size, position (etc) to force attention. A
good designer not only knows where a user is looking
at any instant, but controls the gaze of the user, like a
magician.

9. Forced [Arbitrary] Constraints
A general purpose tool will necessarily be complex.
But a tool with a specific and limited use can be
simple. Constrained (creative) products are highly
desirable in many situations:
Haiku
Tweets
Vine videos
Dogme95
Creativity often results from having constraints.
“Try to please everyone and you please no
one.” It can be okay to create a tool that
doesn’t aim to do everything.

10. Larger
• Big = Simple
• Larger Fonts. More White
Space. Big Images.
• Users don’t like to read. Users don’t have much
time. Users are turned away by a fear of work.
• Many things signal simplicity. Writing with larger fonts not only forces the creator to
consolidate and edit, but signal to the reader that “this is easy”

11. Self Teaching
• The more time it takes to learn or figure
something out, the fewer people will use it.
– Teach through use (no mistakes possible)
– Add features contextually
– Add instruction contextually
– Successful use offers a reward

12. BONUS!
• Simple products are:
– Faster to build
– Easier to modify
– Easier to support
• Removing features not only simplifies a
product for the user, but simplifies the
product for the developer

13. “Editing is not about removing bad things.
Editing is about removing GOOD things to make
the remaining things BETTER.”
— Gabriella Cristiani, Academy Award® Winning Editor