Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.
Interpretation
Simplify design by removing unnecessary elements until it is made functional.
This quote emphasizes the importance of minimalism in design. It suggests that by continuously stripping away excess components, designers can identify the essential elements that contribute to functionality and aesthetics, ensuring that only what truly matters stays in the final product.
In practice
In a design meeting, one might say, 'Remember Alan Cooper's principle: we should take things away until the design breaks.'
Run for your lives-the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces. As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us. In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won't dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.
To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.
If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.
No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.
The role of designers and product makers is to really become much better editors. What kind of functionality is actually needed - and truly delightful - to consumers? Remove all the extraneous stuff.
Often the most important moment in the design process is figuring out what the right question is.
Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That's its role.
Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.
Things which are different in order simply to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.
It is not how much empty space there is, but rather how it is used. It is not how much information there is, but rather how effectively it is arranged.
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