What 3Sixty Knows…

Ten years ago my business partner and I were pitching against each other. Chris and I weren’t partners then, we were competitors.

The clients liked my creative approach, (‘elegant simplicity’ they said). But they were equally impressed by Chris’s commercial thinking. So, in what is still an unusual display of client insight, they suggested awarding the job to both of us, provided we could work together.

We’ve been business partners ever since and the same logic of our respective approaches has prevailed: elegant simplicity allied to commercial thinking. In fact the combination has become stronger.

Over the last ten years, digital has evolved, as has our thinking, but the fundamentals of design simplicity have become even more salient. The world is more technologically complicated now than ever before and as a result people appreciate designs that make their life simpler. The menu structure on my television baffles me. Why? We all want technology, we all understand that it can help, but we’re often frustrated by the time and emotional investment in dealing with it.

The effect of simplicity is to make things look effortless or inevitable. What irony, then, to discover how hard it is to achieve. But let’s not confuse simplicity with arbitrarily removing stuff or minimalism. Giles Colborne’s Simple and Usable (recommended reading by the way) sums it up with a quote:

“Simplicity does not mean want or poverty. It does not mean the absence of any decor, or absolute nudity. It only means that the decor should belong intimately to the design proper, and that anything foreign to it should be taken away.”
Paul Jacques Grillo, Form, Function and Design

Digital tools or apps are (or, at least, should be) the inevitable consequence of a world dominated by complexity. Complexity creates only confusion or, worse, anxiety. There are expert users to whom such complexity appeals, but most people crave simplicity.

Apps force brands to focus on the utility aspect of their marketing. How easy is it for the customer to use? It’s revealing that people who experience brands in this way demonstrate a clear preference for them. You were useful, you helped them solve a problem. You were part of the solution, instead of the problem. That works better than just communicating a simple (simplistic) message.

When starting a digital project, we often invite a broad team of people with different skills to ruminate upon the brief. People from disciplines such as information architecture, user experience, user interface and graphic design, copywriting, back end and front end code, search, data, to name just a few. Everyone looks at the problem through an individual lens. It surprises me how frequently one very important consideration is omitted.

‘What’s the point?’

I’m not trying to be existential, just clear. What do we want the user to do or get out of the experience?

Let me give you a couple of examples:

Google
Remember search engines before Google? They called them portals and you could check weather, stocks, shares… all stuff THEY wanted you to do or see. Then Google came along with a solitary search box. That was it. They got it. That was as much choice as a person could need. Where the web offers way too much choice, Google understood the power of simple utility.

Apple
Their user interface (UI) design is so intuitive you barely need a manual. The iPhone is a wonderful example of industrial design. The actual object only has four physical buttons. The real beauty of its design lies in the UI.

You might be thinking ‘yeah, but that’s not creativity.’ I disagree. Both these examples have something in common. Simplicity and utility. Google and Apple understood the point of the project, what people wanted from it; then they designed something innovative, removing anything that didn’t contribute to its primary function. The result is creative – even, in the eyes of most users, beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong, pure play, passive enjoyment or entertaining stuff can stir emotions, a powerful marketing tool for sure but, ultimately, they’re transient. Providing utility connects a brand in an emotional way because you are helping someone achieve something, contributing to lives in a constructive way and removing some of the burden of increasingly complex lives. What an irresistible association for a brand.

For me, the really creative, hardworking and profitable digital work is based on a useful idea, simply executed.