I was doing my usual rounds on various sites this morning and saw something that caught my eye, talking about how making things simple is difficult. I decided I would read it a bit later, but of course I immediately forgot where I saw it.
A bit later I was speaking a founder who had just launched a new service, and of course as soon as it went live they started to see problems that hadn’t come up in testing.
Both of these things reminded me of quotes that I love about how hard it is to make things simple and easy to use, namely…
I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.
Mark Twain
and
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
But the one quote that always comes to mind when I need to remind myself to keep things simple comes from Star Fleet’s most legendary engineer
Fordie's blog 