Customer Reviews

The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The goal of the book is extremely worthwhile: to promote simplicity. It tries to do so in a small book, about 100 pages in small sized pages. Unfortunately it fails, it does not use it own lessons and presents a complicated description of "Simplicity". In order to simplify, it (ab)uses acronyms that do not elicit the thoughts that are intended. For instance, take SHE (Simplify, Hide, Embody). Using the word SHE is hard to turn your mind to "Simplify, Hide, Embody". Then there is BRAIN (Basics, Repeat, Avoid, Inspire, Never) and SLIP (Sort, Label, Integrate, Prioritize). Simple? To present the ideas, Maeda uses a random collection of recollections, of anecdotes, of circumstantial evidence, organized around ten laws, to illustrate the points it wants to make. As you read, you can find another anecdote from your own life, another experience that can contradict his conclusion. Not all is negative, there are some gems that make the reading worthwhile. For instance, law 10, or "the one": "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful". Imagine if presentations in meetings, conversations or written reports were to keep this law, how more productive our lives would be. This is my simplified review!

I agree with the other reviewer: The dust jacket of this book is a very creative design. The content however is disappointing. The ideas (read: bullet point-level detail) that Maeda begins to talk about show promise. However, he never describes them in sufficient detail for the reader to know what was going on inside his head. The goal of the book is worthy: To boil down simplicity to a few key law-like generalizations. But the book itself does not demonstrate that. Instead, the book is a good example of how too much simplicity can also be undesirable. Perhaps the author was fixated on producing a short 100 page book. Perhaps he assumed too much prior knowledge of his typical readers (or perhaps assumed familiarity with his papers)? The book reminds me of the quote by some famous person (Einstien, I think): Make things just as simple as they need to be, but not simpler." This pretty book is an example of the truth in that statement. I hope that a future book by this author will leave where this one abruptly left off. If you must buy it, borrow it from your library first.

I found the laws themselves to be thought provoking; my mind immediately engaged the task of relating the laws to my own work. While the laws themselves are a delicious reduction the text itself is just the opposite. With such a dogmatic title strapped to a compact book I expected Maeda to directly confront on the topic of simplicity in a brief yet concrete manner (similar to how William Strunk hits the target dead on with The Elements of Style). Instead Maeda only lightly probes "simplicity" with lots of personal anecdotes, abstract thoughts and the iPod (for most examples). The book is more of a meditation on the topic than a "law" book.

I highly recommend reviewing the laws at John Maeda's site: [...] and consider doing your own meditations. Read the book only if you're interested in viewing the cogs turning in the mind of Maeda without them producing the condensed sweetness you might expect in such a compact tome.

(The hardcover book itself is nicely designed, printed and bound for those of you interested in good quality book and a favorable price.)

I had an opportunity to hear John Maeda speak recently. Here are a few things John said that I really like: "Humans want 'more' (food, storage, stuff). So 'more' is an important marketing concept. But while humans want more, design is about less. Yahoo design is about more. Google design is about less."

I ordered "The Laws of Simplicity" even before his speech was done. It is a short book and I read it in one sitting this weekend. II really enjoyed it. My favorite is Law ten: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful."

I am not a designer. Instead I write and speak about marketing. While John writes about simplicity as it relates to design, I am convinced that the same things apply to marketing and PR. For example, marketers love to use big gobbledygook words when they write - things like "mission critical" and "next generation". But simplicity of language is what sells. So I am recommending Laws of Simplicity for marketers too.

If you manage your expectations, this little book can be pleasant, even delightful. But if your interest is for more serious, robust exploration, then look elsewhere.

The title is a bit misleading. The term "Laws" suggest principles that can be universally applied and have been rigorously tested. This book is really more of a set of loosely connected essays about design approaches. The insights are often good, and perhaps helpful, but "laws" they are not. A title like "Reflections on Simplicity in Design" would have been more accurate, and I would have awarded a fourth star if it had been titled more appropriately.

This is really more of a short philosophy book about design, rather than a treatise offering Newtonian-scale laws. But that criticism now made, can this little book be inspiring? Sure.
Is the book overwrought and under-thought? A little.
Does it offer deep exploration? Not really.
Is "Simplicity" a good introduction to the notion of simplicity in design? Yes, up to a point.

One reviewer lamented that "Simplicity" has about the same depth as a dinner conversation. I agree, although that's no reason to think that level of depth is pointless. If it inspires and offers fresh perspectives on old problems, then that can have it's own value. And that's what "Simplicity" offers, but not much more.

Just don't pin your hopes on this offering fundamental design principles; instead use it as a loose collection of design approaches (supported only by brief anecdotes). I'd give it 3.5 starts if I could, the half star being awarded for brevity (but not laws or simplicity itself).

I am a self-confessed computer geek; I have programmed for pay in four languages, taught programming in twelve different languages and have been the instructor for nearly every course in our undergraduate computer science major. Yet, I am constantly frustrated by the electronic devices that I encounter. The remote for my cable box has a terrifying number of buttons, and occasionally some must be pressed in sequence. My small video recorder has only a few buttons, which means that operations almost always require a sequence to be pressed.
In the first case, the attempt to make everything simple has introduced the increased complexity of a large number of buttons and in the second case the attempt to make things simpler has introduced the complexity of sequential actions. Neither one works for me and I am hardly unique.
Maeda puts forward a program designed to introduce true simplicity into the world of human-technological interactions. He starts with what he calls Shrink, Hide, Embody (SHE) and describes 10 laws of simplicity. They are:

*) Reduce - the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
*) Organize - organization makes a system of many appear fewer
*) Time - savings in time feel like simplicity
*) Learn - knowledge makes everything simpler
*) Differences - simplicity and complexity need each other
*) Context - what lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
*) Emotion - more emotions are better than less
*) Trust - in simplicity we trust
*) Failure - some things can never be made simple
*) The One - simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

As the power of technology increases, the human ability to comprehend it decreases. With this reduced comprehension there is a need for simpler and more effective control mechanisms and the ways to do that is the theme of this book. The author is very effective in demonstrating ways to reduce the complexity to the point where it can be managed.
Like most people in information technology (IT) my life his hectic and cluttered. I applied some of the ideas in this book to reduce the clutter in my office by about 30% and will start on the work area of my house this weekend after the commencement exercises. The next time I teach computer interface design; this book will be a required supplement and the students will be required to read it before they move into the area of building a complex user interface.

I was really hoping for a new approach or perspective. This author has managed to take a promising subject and mollest it by going on about loosely connected factoids and trying to make them sound somewhat academic just to be published. I challenge anyone who has read this book to come up with a coherent idea of any new thought presented in it.

I want my money back. When I buy a book called THE LAWS OF SIMPLICITY, written by a university professor I expect more than this! John Maeda simply does not deliver.
The first two laws I could appreciate. Even though they are not new, they deserve a place. But from then on it's disappointing. "3: Savings in time feel like simplicity". Well, duh. "5: Simplicity and complexity need each other" Shameless!
And then there are statements that are simply wrong, e.g. "Simple objects are easier and less expensive to produce" (page 62). That's obviously not true in general.
I had hoped that this book contained some universal laws about simplicity, applicable to e.g. life in general and software applications in particular. No such luck.
I am grateful to the reviewer who recommended "Universal Principles of Design." That book was (and is) very helpful in my profession.

The book is OK, but not brilliantly elegant. If you are looking for a between the eyes shot of design elegance like Tufte skip it. Better to try out the book (universal principals of design).

Simplicity is a single design constraint and objective many other considerations should be put in mind. Again buy the universal principals of design or a great expensive, but great book from Nokia on design UI's. The phone is the ultimate constrained design environment for software.

For a book nominally on simplicity, John Meada's Laws of Simplicity isn't very simple. It is full of supposedly mnemonic acronyms that are impossible to remember. These give his writing a forced feel, since he's beholden to the acronym, rather than the essence of what he's trying to get across. In chapter 4 he reflects that by now, the reader has tired of the acronyms - but he got it wrong - they were tiresome from the start. Some of the concepts are interesting, but they are lost in autobiographical forays, bad metaphors and similes.

The chapter on learning is a good example of what's wrong about the work. He is supposedly talking about learning in the context of simplicity - that knowledge makes any task seem simple. But he only spends one or two paragraphs exploring this - the rest of the chapter is about how best to learn - which is not what I thought the point was. There are entire libraries about how to learn. What was interesting was the suggestion that you can't have a sense of simplicity without the context of prior knowledge. Why did he come up with that only to abandon it?

There's a lack of Gestalt (which is ironic, because he describes this concept early on) and the book comes off as a loose collection of thoughts forced into relation to each other. Either the book should be totally rewritten (can the real book about simplicity please stand up?) or it should be re-purposed into "A Collection Of John Meada's Random Thoughts: Some Of Them On Simplicity".

The author does mention some of these flaws himself in chapter 9 - "Failure". He felt it was important to release the book now even though it was far from perfect. I disagree - this book isn't even half-baked. He also admits this was the first book he had written more than designed.

Simplicity is elegance - nothing extra - nothing getting in the way. This book needs to be boiled down and reduced further. More meat less fluff. No doubt John Meada is a great designer and thinker. The Laws of Simplicity fails to convey the author's knowledge.