Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work | Hacker News Reader

Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

xp.c2.com

30 pointsjoubee11 comments

The website itself is definitely an application of the "Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work" principal. It's pretty much just plain text.

Nonetheless I think it has a fairly good argument, though it could lead to woefully inane mistakes because of not thinking things through sufficiently.

That website is the Very First Wiki. And indeed, Ward Cunningham was going for simplicity.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples

I must say that it is cool in a retro sort of way, but I still like Wikipedia better. I mean the fact the page titles tend to have no spaces, and instead have the first letter of each word capitalized such as:

ExampleTitleInTheVeryFirstWiki

That's interesting from a programming point of view, but I'd rather see clear, clean titles. Hence my judgement that is is cool in a retro, back to the early 90's sort of way.

There is enough timeless content there to attract interested people anyway. Despite its retro look the site is still active to a degree, though I'm not sure how much original content there is. Many of the popular topics have been beaten to death and the conclusion, as always, is that the best solution or method depends on the problem. The arguments can be very engaging, but it goes the other way too.

MediaWiki is a crap example -- its titles must start with a capital letter

It was the simplest thing that could possibly work, and it did.

But if you can develop rapidly, you can quickly refactor and add what you need. As a result, you spend all of your time building or morphing into what you need, and zero time building what you don't. And believe me, building what you don't really need is a big problem in most software development.

Thanks for this link. The following "laws" of simplicity by John Maeda may be of interest too:

10 Laws of Simplicity

1. Reduce: the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

3. Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.

4. Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.

5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.

6. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.

8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.

9. Failure: Some things can never be made simpler.

10. The one: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

[From the book The laws of simplicity by John Maeda]

http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Simplicity-Design-Technology-Busi...

For those in the bay area, that's one of the books we're going to cover at the UX Book Club. The next one is Mental Models, then the Maeda book.

http://groups.google.com/group/ux-book-club-san-francisco (for more info)

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52431519012 (for RSVPs)

It's definitely not a group just for designers, we've got engineers and researchers, so I'd encourage anyone to show up. I've gotten a lot out of it, I moderated the two meetings on Bill Buxton's book and it's one of the best non-work things I've done since moving up here.

9. I suspect everything can.

I thought the same. Then, I was trying to find examples for systems that cannot be simplified further without changing their functional definitions. For instance, chopsticks appear to be a tool that is as simple as it can be.

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