Simple is not a bad word.

Simple simply means that the idea is expressed in its purest form. Strip away the bells and whistles. Strip away the egos involved. Strip away the distractions, the options that don’t help to lead to successful outcomes. On the web, I think simple is a good thing. Simple is the goal.

When it comes to web work, simple is my mantra. You can probably see it in my work, for good or for ill. You’ll certainly see it in my writing, or if you hear me talking about anything web related. Sometimes I wrestle with how simple is too simple, especially in my design work. But I keep coming back to the idea that a web design is intended to relay a message and generate action. And that all too often the pursuit of something engaging and new and different and special ends up only in delivering pretty distractions and gee whiz confusion.

When I was your age, we had to design user interfaces in ten feet of snow…

I started my career at AOL in 1994. Everything we designed we designed with novices in mind. And I don’t mean today’s novice. I mean “what does click mean” novices. The people AOL was trying to attract knew nothing about navigating online spaces. We had to practically move them through online “areas” (as we called them) with velvet ropes and ushers showing the way. Design was limited to 16 colors on Windows and a glorious 256 color palette on Mac. But pushing those graphics down a 56k modem line to our users was not only cumbersome, it was their number one complaint for many years.

So how do you design when most of your designers’ skills are either cut off or they are part of the problem? Today’s web doesn’t have the same problems as the AOL of 1994, but it can learn from the same lessons. Users love beauty, and technology can solve problems, neither is in doubt. But both must be tailored to the user experience, and dedicated to communicating the messages that the site intends to communicate, with the goal of generating the right action from the user.

So, what? Design dull sites and use old technology?

The challenge of connecting with a user doesn’t limit what you can do with design and technology. It only raises the bar. It means you can’t just design what looks good, and you can’t just rely on the technology as documented. It means you have to take both facets of your web work and view them through the eyes of a human being — without expertise in either area — for whom it is critically important that they receive your message and proceed toward the successful completion of some goal.

Simple web sites can have strong design and elegant uses of technology that would make Skynet weep. Simple sites aren’t simple because they do less or look worse. They’re simple because they’re understood, inside and out, by the people that view them, own them, work on them, and use them on a regular basis. They’re not bloated or distracted. They’re built in commented, structured, standardized code. They’re aware of the limitations of monitors and eyes and attention spans. Simple sites know that they can be expanded tomorrow, if need be, and they’re built to accommodate that. They’re not as simple as they were in 1994 because they don’t need to be. Users change and technology changes and the definition of simplicity (as it relates to user experience) changes with it.

Simplicity may be a slippery and unglamorous goal for web professionals, but our job is to deliver web sites that work, and well-realized simplicity never fails.

(Oh, and not that it’s terribly important, but frequently the simple solution will also be cheaper, faster to implement, and easier to maintain over time. So it’s got that going for it. Which is nice.)