Raffles Design International, Mumbai

Swaminathan Jayaraman

Submitted in partial fulfillment of module Graphic Design and Multimedia Studio

of the BDes Multimedia Design

24th August 2010

Abstract
The most important ideas are simple ones. And the most important among these is
simplicity itself. Simplicity has always been appreciated and understood best in the applied arts,
such as design.

Simple, powerful systems are an ideal of interaction design—and hard to find in the wild.
Reduction is the path to simplicity, and minimalism describes paths to approach reduction. As
the ultimate thought model, minimalism is a tool to think about the simple and to discover and
instantiate patterns for designing simplicity.

The visual simplicity of interfaces is often directly connected to their ease of use—it is
assumed that by simplifying the impression of the interface, the usability would increase. Bruce
Tognazzini (1992) drastically illustrates the need for simplicity: ‘‘Designers learn in 6 months,
users have to learn the same in 6 minutes”. He proposes visual simplicity as a means of helping
the user: In the Macintosh, we try to be as sparing of words and extra visual clutter whenever
possible. However, ‘‘create visual simplicity’’ could not be called exact instructions, sometimes
we all overdo it... So organization of the visual elements makes the interface look neat and there
is not visual clutter.

All interactions take place over time. Sometimes that time can be near-instantaneous, like
the time it takes to click a mouse. Sometimes it can involve very long durations. Interaction
designers need an awareness of time. Some tasks are complicated and take a long time to
complete—for instance, searching for and buying a product. Shrinking time is all about making
the wait shorter or making the wait more tolerable. The interface is simpler when a lot of time is
saved or felt as if it is saved.

Keywords

Simplicity, Interface design, Reduction, Minimalism, Usability, Visual simplicity, Organization,

Time

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Declaration

 I declare that all the work in this essay is my own and all sources have been acknowledged.

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List of Contents
1 Introduction………………………………………………………………... 4

2 Reduction in interface design……………………………………………... 5

3 Organize – The traditional folder way…………………………………… 7

4 Time SHE’d – The Chrome and Mac way……………………………. 9

5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 11

6 Bibliography……………………………………………………………….. 12

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Introduction

The prime challenge in interaction design is attaining simplicity. The key here relies on a
very minimalistic approach to any design which explores the communication capacity of the
interactive environments. This minimalistic approach results in successful design solutions, mind
blowing interactive experiences and new interaction techniques too.

Reduction, Organization and Time are the three keys which helps the designers to
achieve simplicity in a very sophisticated way.

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Reduction in Interface design

The main objective is to focus on simplicity and expressiveness in interface design. The
simplicity is introduced so that simple embedded interfaces are created. This particular way of
creating simplicity will reduce the complexity and enhance the reach ability of the information of
a set of interface components. What we have to do is to reduce, remove if something is doubtful.
Simplicity, minimalist design and aesthetics are not only used interchangeably, they are also
commonly positively annotated and associated with ‘‘good design’’ and ‘‘high usability’’. This
makes it often difficult to find out what exactly is simpler—simpler is most certainly what is
better. That, in turn, prevents the simpler to present a choice, or the designer to choose one kind
of simplicity over another.

Now we will analyze two different interfaces of two different DVD menus. But the
movies are related to each other in a way. We are going to analyze the blockbuster movies The
Terminator part 1 and 2.

Fig 1. The Terminator DVD menu. Courtesy of IMDB

As you can see in Fig.1 there are four main buttons. And the Play is highlighted. Even though the
graphics are very highly sophisticated and follow the context of the movie and give a sci-fi effect
to the whole DVD menu, the way users are presented with the conventional DVD menu has been
retained. The same Play, Scene selections, Subtitle options and some special features have been
used. This creates a very simplistic feel and the audience because the unwanted elements have
been thoughtfully removed.

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Fig 2. The Terminator 2 DVD menu. Courtesy of IMDB

Here you can see there is too much of reduction. There is the same kind of visual interface layout
but the graphics have been changed along with the way the menu elements are presented. They
are totally working according to the context of the movie. For the users who haven’t seen the
first part but they sit for this movie would really find it difficult to figure out which button
corresponds to what function. There is too much reduction happening that there is no where the
title of the movie is indicated.

So how do we achieve simplicity? When the functionality of a system is being reduced without
paying penalty, a sense of true simplicity is felt.

‘Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.’

- Dr. Koichi Kawana, Architect – Hanging Gardens

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Organize – the traditional folder way

‘Both the internal design and the user interface can have simplicity, but the interaction
between the user and the program is what concerns us here, and frequently we have to sacrifice
the simplicity of internal design to make the user interface simple.’
-Paul Heckel (1984)

User interface design is more than decoration. Yet, observation of the visual attributes of an
interface yields important clues about its functionality—the visibility of elements of the user
interface determines the access to functionality. A balance has to be found between immediacy
and richness of interaction.
To achieve the clean visibility, the simplicity is achieved through four steps which are
sorting them, then labeling them, integrating them and prioritizing. According to John Maeda, if
we follow these four steps we can achieve a sense of organization. When we work with a very
few subjects it makes life simpler as compared to being given too many choices.

I call this organizing the folder way. The traditional folders in Windows operating system
is what I am talking about. They actually show the way things should be organized. The folder
sorts according to the Name, the date of modification, the type of file and the size of the file.
Similarly in an interface things should be grouped to a level and look organized. Labeling them
will create more visual identity where there is specificity and users will be able to figure out
easily what they are looking out and what they get. All similar files inside windows folder can be
arranged together to easily pick the file you would exactly need. So integrate them into one
single group. If you can see any interface has the most important functions on the top or with big
icons. This usually gives the illusion of importance and the priority you give to certain elements
stand out more.

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 Fig 3. iDrive interface Courtesy BMW

In iDrive, the organization of four different controls into a single demanding interface which
doesn’t create any visual clutter because the way four controls are organized so that it gives a
very clean and sophisticated look.

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Time SHE’d – The Chrome and the Mac way

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

While at first glance, this law might seem patently obvious, it is one of the most ignored
principles in design. Fitts' law dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be
approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out. Fitts' law
dictates that the windows task bar will constantly and unnecessarily get in people's way, and this
is proven out. Fitts' law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display
are the four corners of the screen, because of their pinning action, and yet, for years, they seemed
to be avoided at all costs by designers. Use large objects for important functions (Big buttons are
faster). Use the pinning actions of the sides, bottom, top, and corners of your display: A single-
row toolbar with tool icons that "bleed" into the edges of the display will be many times faster
than a double row of icons with a carefully-applied one-pixel non-clickable edge between the
tools and the side of the display.

When it comes to time, there are two important things to be noted. The amount of time
one spends in waiting for something to happen creates complexity.

‘Saving in time feel like simplicity’

- John Maeda, The laws of simplicity, pg 24

All interactions take place over time. Sometimes that time can be near-instantaneous, like
the time it takes to click a mouse. Sometimes it can involve very long durations. You can still
find online usenet messages (usenet is a sort of bulletin board system) from decades
ago.Movement through space takes time to accomplish. As every gamer will attest, it takes time
to press buttons (around 8 milliseconds at the fastest). Even with broadband speeds, it takes time
for packets of data to travel from distant servers through the physical wires and perhaps through
the air via wireless signal to your computer.

Interaction designers need an awareness of time. Some tasks are complicated and take a
long time to complete—for instance, searching for and buying a product. Many e-commerce
Web sites require you to log in before purchasing, and that login session will be active for a set
time. Imagine if Amazon or other e-commerce sites timed out every few minutes and required
you to log in repeatedly while shopping—it’s unlikely you’d buy much from them. Some travel
and concert-ticket Web sites make users race against the clock to enter their credit card
information before their selected seats are lost.

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 You can feel the impact of milliseconds, however. Extra milliseconds added to every
keystroke or mouse-click would probably make you think your computer is slow because of the
tiny delay. Several hundred milliseconds would cause frustration and anger, and a single-second
delay each time you pressed a key would probably make your computer unusable.
Time creates rhythm. How fast something pops up on the screen or how long it takes to
complete an action like renewing your driver’s license controls the rhythm of the interaction.
Games are often about rhythm: how many aliens come at you at any given moment, or how long
does it take to complete a level. Rhythm is also an important component of animation: how
quickly does a folder open or close on the desktop, how slowly does a drop-down menu slide
open. Interaction designers control this rhythm.
Interactions happen over time. The other concept is making the wait tolerable like
creating preloaders when it comes to interaction design. I will call it the Mac way because Mac
essentially created the tolerance in the users and also gave an illusion of speed by using
appropriate icons and cursors.

Fig 4. Cursors Courtesy Apple

In Fig 4. We can see that how the watch cursor gives an illusion of real time waiting. This
actually makes the wait more tolerable than the Hour Glass of windows which is boring and
static which doesn’t give any illusion of movement and people started sensing boredom.

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Fig 5. Latest Mac Cursors Courtesy Apple

Later apple changed the way the busy icon being shown from a watch to colorful swirl
which gives the illusion of the process ending faster than the hourglass again. Even chrome
started using swirls and certain techniques which again gave the illusion of the process being
faster than the original process takes the same time as it takes in firefox.

CONCLUSION
As Andrea Ragnetti says ‘Maeda is the Master of Simplicity’, it is proved that the laws he has
formulated on simplicity are some of the key essential ones in order to get users experience
satisfaction. Through reduction he has explained us how unwanted functions should be removed.
Through organization he has helped us to achieve visually clean and an uncluttered design.
Through time he has explained the kind of illusion people need to be taken into so that the
interface is highly successful. However incorporation of all these laws into one single body
might become a complicated for the designers who haven’t followed simplicity, minimalism,
time, reduction and organization closely.

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Bibliography
Maeda J,(2006) The Laws of simplicity, MIT-Massachusetts.
Obendorf H,(2009) Minimalism – Designing simplicity, University of Hambury, Germany.
Keizer G, (2010) Mozilla Designer Touts Tricks to Give Firefox the Illusion of Speed,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/199229/mozilla_designer_touts_tricks_to_give_firefox_the_illusion_of_
speed.html (Jun 18, 2010)

Raphael JR, (2010) Browser Battle: Firefox 3.1 vs. Chrome vs. IE 8, 
http://www.pcworld.com/article/150828/browser_battle_firefox_31_vs_chrome_vs_ie_8.html (Sep 9,
2008)

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