Why simplicity is so difficult
- 3 min read
Designers love talking about simplicity.
Clients love asking for it.
Users love experiencing it.
Nobody seems to enjoy the part where you actually have to create it.
Somehow, making something simple has become one of the hardest jobs in software. Not because simplicity is technically difficult, but because humans have a remarkable talent for believing that adding one more thing can’t possibly hurt.
“Could we add another filter?”
“Can we make that button stand out a little more?”
“What if we gave users more options?”
It’s fascinating. We spend years learning that less is more, then spend our meetings arguing for… more.
Software is one of the few industries where people genuinely believe a Swiss Army knife is easier to use than a spoon.
More
Complexity doesn’t usually arrive wearing a villain’s cape.
It shows up disguised as a good idea.
One feature won’t hurt. One extra setting might help. One additional notification could improve engagement. Individually, every suggestion sounds perfectly reasonable. Collectively, they turn a clean product into the digital equivalent of your kitchen junk drawer.
You know the one.
It contains batteries, rubber bands, old receipts, three mysterious keys, a charger for a phone you no longer own, and somehow… a single Lego brick.
Every product has one.
Some companies just call it the Settings page.
Ego
Here’s an uncomfortable thought.
Sometimes we don’t make products complicated because users need complexity.
We make them complicated because complexity feels like effort.
There’s a strange belief in our industry that if something looks simple, it must have been easy to design. Nobody looks at a beautifully minimal interface and says, “Wow, someone probably deleted two hundred bad ideas to get here.”
Instead they ask, “Is that it?”
Yes.
That’s it.
Michelangelo supposedly said he carved the statue by removing everything that wasn’t David. Designers spend half their careers trying to do the same thing, except every stakeholder keeps asking if David could also have a search bar, dark mode, an AI assistant, social features, and maybe blockchain for some reason.
Fear
The real enemy of simplicity isn’t creativity.
It’s fear.
We’re afraid someone might need that feature one day.
We’re afraid removing an option will upset a customer.
We’re afraid saying “no” in a meeting makes us look uncooperative.
So instead of making decisions, we preserve possibilities.
And products slowly become museums of ideas nobody had the courage to remove.
Every button represents a meeting where nobody wanted to disappoint anyone.
Users end up disappointing themselves instead.
Clarity
The irony is that users almost never ask for complexity.
They ask for clarity.
Nobody wakes up hoping today’s banking app has seventeen ways to transfer money. They just want to send money without accidentally financing someone else’s holiday.
Good design isn’t about removing things until nothing is left.
It’s about removing everything that doesn’t deserve to be there.
That’s much harder.
It requires saying “no” far more often than saying “yes.” It requires choosing what matters instead of displaying everything that exists. And perhaps most importantly, it requires accepting that every feature you add is another decision you’re asking someone else to make.
Simplicity isn’t the absence of work.
It’s the result of doing the hard work first, so your users don’t have to.
And maybe that’s why it’s so rare.
After all, adding things makes everyone in the meeting feel productive.
Removing them requires someone to quietly ask the most uncomfortable question in product design:
“Are we sure anyone actually needs this?”