Work hard to make things simple

Bowling Alley

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” ERNST F. SCHUMACHER

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." ERNST F. SCHUMACHER

— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) January 8, 2018

It’s easy to write software. Ask users what they want (or even better, observe them and discover their problems), find a clean, user-friendly solution, build it and deliver it, for free, with no ads.

And you make a success of it, so you add more features to see off the competition, or to disrupt a new market. Google built Gmail, then added automatic categories, and Smart Replies to make it easier to process your messages. And they also added Wave, Buzz, Google+, Talk and others, to demonstrate other ways to connect and communicate, for places where email doesn’t work so well. So many new features, new things to learn, spinning out from that new core.

And yet Gmail remains popular, the rest, not so much.

It’s easy to add features. With a bit of work, you can even add them seamlessly without adding another menu option that your users will never see.

But what’s your plan to remove options, to streamline your code? How do add a new feature that’s easily discoverable and useful? How can you be smart and subtle?

What is your simplification strategy?

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