Design thinking
Simplicity is not a trend
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Simplicity has been a recurring theme in design for decades. Long before it became the default aesthetic of tech products, the Swiss typographers of the 1950s were already stripping things back to their essentials. What we see today — clean interfaces, minimal navigation, products that just work — is not new. It is a wave that keeps coming back, because the underlying need never really goes away.
Why simplicity matters
As the world around us gets more complex, the products that help us focus become more valuable. Simplicity reduces the number of decisions a user has to make. It creates clarity instead of confusion, and builds trust through transparency.
The business case is just as strong. Netflix and Spotify succeeded in large part because their model was easy to understand. Nest turned a functional but forgettable household device into something people actually wanted to interact with. Apple has built one of the most valuable companies in history on the conviction that simplicity and quality go hand in hand.
Interestingly, simplicity also changes behaviour. When something is genuinely easy and fair to use, people stop looking for workarounds. The ease of streaming music legally did more to reduce piracy than years of legal threats.
The paradox is that none of this comes easy. Simplicity requires you to make hard choices, and to be confident enough in those choices to defend them.
Four ways to get there
In his book Simple and Usable, Giles Colborne describes four strategies for achieving simplicity. They are as useful now as they were when the book was published.
Remove
The most direct approach. Start by questioning whether something needs to be there at all. The question is not "why should this go?" but "why should this stay?" Every feature, every option, every piece of content should earn its place.
Google's search page is the obvious example — a white page with a single input field, at a time when every other search engine was trying to show you as much as possible. It worked because it trusted users to know what they were there for.
Organise
Not everything can be removed. But by structuring information well — using visual hierarchy, colour, whitespace, and grouping — you can make something complex feel manageable. Good organisation tells users what matters and where to look, without spelling it out.
This is particularly relevant for products that handle a lot of data. The goal is not to show less, but to show things in a way that makes sense at a glance.
Hide
Some things belong in the product but do not need to be visible all the time. Advanced settings, contextual information, secondary actions — these can be tucked away without being lost. The key is that users can find them when they need them, and are not distracted by them when they do not.
Context is increasingly useful here. Knowing where someone is, what time it is, or what they are in the middle of doing allows you to show only what is relevant in that moment.
Move
Sometimes simplicity means putting functionality somewhere else entirely — a different part of the product, or a different device. What feels cumbersome on a phone may work perfectly on a desktop. What belongs in the moment does not need to live in the same place as the archive and the analysis.
The goal is a seamless experience across the whole, not cramming everything into one place.
Simplicity is not the same as emptiness
There is a version of simplicity that goes too far — stripped of personality, cold, and ultimately forgettable. Good simplicity is not about removing everything, it is about removing everything that does not need to be there. Those are very different things.
Some products are genuinely complex. A tax return, a clinical tool, a game with depth — these cannot and should not be reduced to a single tap. Simplicity is about respecting the user's attention, not about pretending hard things are easy.
The real aim is to take on the complexity yourself, so the person using your product does not have to.