About a month ago we wrapped work on a UX project for a web based health and fitness tool called Graphite (site launching soon). The tool helps users achieve weight loss and maintenance goals by tracking the calories they consume (eat) and the calories they expend (exercise).

The advantage Graphite has over more ‘full featured’ competitors is its simplicity (most competitors include things like exercise videos, fitness groups, profile pages, competitions, recipes, blogs, forums, calculators…). By being very intentional about limiting functionality, Graphite minimizes the effort and cost involved in integrating the tool with one’s life. The painlessness of adoption ensures that users utilize the tool more frequently, and decreases the odds of attrition over time.

The simplicity of Graphite is of great benefit to its users. But, it was also of benefit to us and the client during the UX design and development process. The clearly defined functional limitations of ‘phase one’ afforded us the opportunity to explore a narrow set of concepts to an appropriately deep level, instead of just scratching the surface on an unnecessarily wide array of features and functionality.

With Graphite fresh in my mind, I put together a quick list of some of the benefits we experience when simplicity is given an appropriate level of importance. This list is certainly not comprehensive, and it’s definitely a bit idealistic. Experiencing all, or even most of these benefits in any one project would definitely be the exception to the rule.

Simplicity:

  • Facilitates focus
  • Helps identify the right problem(s)
  • Helps you ask better questions
  • Makes success tangible
  • Allows for failure iteration
  • Allows for experimentation
  • Facilitates accountability
  • Minimizes repeated/wasted effort
  • Encourages excellence, rather than ‘good enough’
  • Encourages process
  • Lets you dig deeper, faster
  • Encourages a degree of meandering (and the happy accidents it can create)
  • Provides time to listen and learn
  • Creates time to test your assumptions and work (your concepts and models, not just software QA!)
  • Helps make things that are usable