The curse of simple design
Cartoon from Ok/cancel
<a href=
””http://www.jnd.org”>Don Norman has a very insightful look at Google’s web design in his latest essay – The truth about Google’s so called “Simplicity”
Here’s a snippet from his article…
Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages.
Google isn’t the only one to suffer this fate. I can remember when Amazon had dozens of category tabs on the top of their page. Thank god they fixed that! Amazon have recently added AJAX enabled tabs which let you browse all their categories.
This is a poignant reminder that we all need to be careful in design our interfaces, as things are always going to change!