Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Simplicity in Web Apps

Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford University does some interesting work in understanding Web 2.0 to human interactions... he even teaches a course at Stanford fully dedicated to Facebook :-)

Anyway, this is his model of simplicity as it relates to web apps, a very brief and rough intro, but maybe you'll find it useful - http://behaviormodel.org/ability.html

What I took away from it:

  • An ugly / simplistic but useful definition of SIMPLICITY: The minimally satisfying solution at the lowest cost.
  • Simplicity is contextual, i.e. it depends on the situation or person (not necessarily the product)
  • Simplicity is a function of your scarcest resource at that moment, where Fogg identifies these resources: Time, Money, Physical Effort, Brain Cycles, Social Deviance (i.e. going against socially acceptable norms), Non-Routine
Interesting stuff, he has many more resources on his web pages.

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