Purposefully constrained
I’m an evangelist of the “less is more” mantra - especially when it comes to user experiences and design.
The example that comes to mind to everyone is Google. After all these years, the home page is even better than when it first launched in 1998 (screen shot).
Twitter is also a classic example. 140 characters. That’s all you get. It would have been so easy to try to do more. But Jack is a genius and he nailed it.
Another one of my favorites is Tumblr. It’s the simplest, most elegant blogging platform on the planet. The Tumblr constraints are purposeful.
Want to publish a photo? Click the photo button. How about a quote? Same thing. Simple, clean buttons to show the way. And that’s it.
Last week, we bought a new iMac for our house. In the past, every Mac we bought came along with a purchase of Microsoft Office.
This time we skipped Office and bought a copy of iWork in its place. The software includes Pages (word processor), Keynote (presentations) & Numbers (spreadsheet).
The price of iWork is signficantly less than Microsoft Office. And it comes with a lot less features than Microsoft Office.
But those iWork apps are amazing. They are fast, they get out of your way, they don’t have toolbars that take up half the screen.
They are purposefully constrained.
Just the way I like it :)
