Elegance is Simple. Not Vice Versa

User Experience June 02, 2009

I've written about "simplicity" being important in design. While that's true, I'd like to clarify that it's really "elegance" that's important - not so much simplicity. Here's the difference:

Elegance calls for an interface with all the facets necessary to do what it needs to without any extra features or components. Because the word "elegant" means to select carefully, the fundamental idea is to take away until you can't anymore.

Simplicity, on the other hand, is rather vague. A black dot on a large white canvas is simple. But does it do what it needs to? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

So when it comes to designing an interface, "simple" is not really the appropriate word choice. You want elegant. A design that's too simple may not be robust enough to accomplish the tasks presented to your users and therefore is rather useless.

The Google homepage is simple, yes, but it's elegant. You go to the site to search. Because that's their driving functionality and core feature, there really is no reason to clutter it up. It's a quick jumping-off point. You're not meant to linger. The iGoogle page, however, fills the rest of that white space with all sorts of widgets and extra features. You're meant to linger here.

The Twitter page design is simple. Maybe not elegant, but they're getting there. Before they started with some of their redesigns, the page was *too* simple - it didn't do enough of what the users needed it to. Luckily, all the third party apps have closed that gap. As they improve the main Twitter page, however, they maintain the simplistic structure, but just fill in some of the blanks, allowing it to do more of what's needed without compromising the interface.

You might compare this ideology to people you've met in the world: some people are really simple - they barely talk and, if they do, they don't say much. Not so valuable. Others might talk way too much, all the time, and still not say much either (or they might say too much and it's overload). But there are plenty of people - mostly the successful ones - who only say what they need to and say meaningful things. Elegance.

This isn't to say that simple is bad. But you have to be careful with simple. Going with elegance is always the right way.

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