When Less Is More

I try to follow all of John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity, but there are a few standouts:

Law 1: Reduce
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

Law 2: Organize
Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

Law 10: The One
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

I have a hard time getting people to understand that the customer probably doesn’t need to see every column in our database.  They probably aren’t ever sorting on phone numbers.  They probably wonder why all those extra columns are being shown to them in the first place.  The reason is because someone at the company thinks that some customer somewhere will get upset if they are removed.

An excellent example of when less is more is in the case of weather forecast data.  As an end user who just wants to see the weather forecast, which would you rather see?