Simple Is The New Cool

We've all heard it: "simple is the new cool".  It's true.

We certainly see it in the UX world.  Simple designs for human interaction.  Tell me what I need to do, how to do it, and make it easy.  If I only had a dollar for every time I heard that mantra... And when we consider the market moving to the cloud, UX is the major differentiation - and simple is carrying the day every day.

That last paragraph?  Double-down on it for mobile.

And we see it in system architecture as well.  Big emphasis on unraveling institutional spaghetti bowls of interfaces, services and business processes in favor of simple, straight-forward enterprise architectures.

Packaged enterprise applications?  Sure.  How many times over the past five years have we heard and seen examples of "reconsider your customizations"?

And let's not forget about embedded analytics that blur the line between business intelligence and transactional reporting.  We're making it simpler to identify and understand the information we need, rather than getting wrapped around the axle about how to classify the source of that information.

Everywhere you look in the enterprise applications world these days, it's all about simplification.  Simple is the new cool.

So how do you start with simple?  You start with a strong focus on the problem you're trying to solve.  What are you making better?  And, by the way, problems like "our company needs to sell more software/services to end users"?  Not the type of problem I have in mind here.  Think about a warehouse working taking inventory.  A college freshman attempting to register.  An AP specialist attempting to identify and analyze payables trends.  Those are the types of problems you want to solve.  Those are the types of situations you want to make better.

Get focused.  Simple is the new cool.