Less Is Still More
Jens Meiert, May 21, 2008 / August 2, 2009.
This entry is filed under Web Development, Accessibility, Usability, Design, User Experience.
How much time and money gets spent on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating. Allow me to elaborate, starting with HTML newsletters: People (let) spend hours on writing supposed content, create and decorate mockups, work around ridiculous email client implementations, and finally send mails that aren’t read at all, and, at the end of the day, harm the sender.
Take some designers decorators: Instead of communicating contents, hours or days are spent to create distracting non-information that takes longer to load and that probably violates every rule brought to us by century-old craftsmanship in information design, and that is then labeled “creativity” and “design”. Take the various ways standard interaction elements supposedly need to be redesigned in order to make them as undiscoverable and unusable as possible.
Take some web developers: Instead of gaining experience by developing and optimizing websites, “frameworks” are used that require initial training to do something that is neither tailored nor elegantly written nor fast nor anything. Generally take the countless efforts to clutter markup by unnecessary elements, unnecessary attributes, unnecessarily long ID and class names, non-semantic or over-semantic ID and class names, pseudo-accessible techniques, and so on, in order to make the result as slow and unmaintainable as possible. Take style sheets that need to be referred to in plural, not singular, that reset everything in order to do almost the same work again, by the author, not colleagues, of course.
But, less is still more, even though “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” And neither do I want to sound all-knowing nor complain: After all, these phenomena are part of a (learning) process and ultimately make it interesting to work in our industry; yet even, right, fascinating. 
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Comments
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On May 21, 2008, 21:11 CEST, Duluoz said:
Client comes to you with 0. They want 1.
Decorator says - ” 2-2=0 + 5 +10 +25= 40 - 2=38… 38-26=12/2=6+1-8+1+2-1=1.”
Developer says - “well we have 5x, not sure what x is .. hold on.. ok we’re up to speed on what x is.. now.. what did you want again? 1? well.. let me get back to you… ok we can do 1 lets talk to our decorators…”
I’m lost.
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On May 22, 2008, 10:31 CEST, James said:
Ha ha, very good point - one I wish people would remember a bit more before they go specifying to the Developer(s) that they want 1, but they’d also like to be able to make it 0.2, 0.3 … 0.95.
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On May 22, 2008, 22:08 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
David, James, nice metaphors that already deserve yet additional attention
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On May 28, 2008, 16:58 CEST, tedd said:
Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of style.–Jonathan Swift
We all have style, just some have more than others. It does seem that verbosity is inversely proportional to style.
While I don’t find it difficult to tell a client that what he wants to say is too much, I do find it next to impossible to get them to understand that less is more..
I call it the NASCAR syndrome. You design a web site to get a single point across to the user, namely buy the client’s product and the client wants to clutter it up with distractions. They take a million dollar idea and paste 10 cent decals all over it.
Too bad I wasn’t born rich, because then I could annoy the hell out of people with my ignorance.
