The Simplicity Shift
Innovative Design Tactics in a Corporate World

The Simplicity Shift is about shifting a company's culture to value, discover and implement Simplicity, creating designed products.

Scott Jenson (Author)

9780521527491, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 November 2002

182 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.25 kg

'The conversational writing style and the excellent instructive examples make the book appealing not only to technology experts, but also to managers and to consumers of products and services who sometimes (or often) wonder why it is so difficult to use something …'. Computing Reviews

High tech products have historically had notoriously poor design. Fortunately, companies have recently started to embrace user centered design practices. This transition hasn't been smooth, however, as many companies have trouble transferring good design into final, shipping products. There is a political/cultural disconnect between the corporate desire for good design and the corporate culture that implements it. The Simplicity Shift is about shifting a company's culture to value, discover and implement Simplicity, creating well designed products. For most companies, Product Design is not a first class citizen, it is something locked into a 'design department' and done as a subtask of a larger sequential process. For companies to truly create breakthrough, easy to use products, they must elevate design so that its terms and tools are shared by everyone in the team. Design is a strategic tool that must become a part of how everyone in the company thinks, acts, and, most importantly, makes decisions.

1. Motivation
2. Vocabulary
3. Why is bad design such good business?
4. User blindness
5. Design interlude - redesigning a timer thermostat
6. Feature blindness
7. Design interlude - redesigning a digital jukebox
8. Innovation blindness
9. Design interlude - mobile phones
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Human-computer interaction [UYZ], Ethical & social aspects of IT [UBJ], Technical design [TBD]