The more powerful machines have become, and the larger the screens we work with (I am writing this on an LG 49" ultrawide), the easier it becomes to jam a bunch of stuff in there.
A good exercise for Keeping It Simple, Stupid (KISS), is to write firmware for fixed displays, or mobile device software (although mobile devices are starting to look more and more like full-sized computers, these days).
I learned religion from Scott Jenson's excellent The Simplicity Shift[0]. It was written before the iPhone.
Most of the tips in there, could be applied to desktop/laptop computer software. I used to use his "triage" methodology, in the days that we wrote host software, at my old job.
This book is over 100 pages long -- any chance you could summarize some of the most important ideas, like the "triage" methodology, so we can figure out if we want to read it?
Well, it's hardly more than a pamphlet. The book is physically, quite small, and each page is done in fairly sparse font. Took me about a day and a half to read. It's not a technical book. It's aimed at Marketing and Product Management folks. Jenson isn't a tech. He's a product designer. One of the best in the world.
But the main gist of the book is about prioritizing features. Remember that it was written, when the peak of phone technology was the Motorola RAZR, with its tiny screen, and people were writing “m.” mobile sites in WML.
It recommends a pretty intense selection process, with a lot of bathwater being thrown out, and care, taken, not to include the babies in that.
The methodology that I developed, based on this philosophy, was what I call "Front of the Box/Back of the Box."
Say we have a boxed product on a store shelf. The front of the box is facing out.
You only want to list no more than three main features, in big font, on the front of the box, to catch the buyer's attention.
The buyer then takes down the box, and turns it around, so you can list, maybe four features, on the back, in smaller font.
The rest of the features are listed on the sides of the box, in even smaller font.
When we look at our feature set this way, it requires a brutal triage. We need to do away with the thought that "Every Feature is Precious," and select the three (maximum) "Front of the Box" features, etc.
This also affects the project design and implementation, as well. We need to make sure that the "Front of the Box" features are done first, even if they are not the most problematic or challenging features. They are the ones that will be important to the end-user.
That way, when the inevitable "crunch time" comes, and we are tossing out features, the ones we toss out, are the "Side of the Box" features.
The more powerful machines have become, and the larger the screens we work with (I am writing this on an LG 49" ultrawide), the easier it becomes to jam a bunch of stuff in there.
A good exercise for Keeping It Simple, Stupid (KISS), is to write firmware for fixed displays, or mobile device software (although mobile devices are starting to look more and more like full-sized computers, these days).
I learned religion from Scott Jenson's excellent The Simplicity Shift[0]. It was written before the iPhone.
Most of the tips in there, could be applied to desktop/laptop computer software. I used to use his "triage" methodology, in the days that we wrote host software, at my old job.
[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf