This 2021 post from Jason Fried is a good chaser to his “The Big Regression” this week (which I linked to yesterday):
Much of the tension in product development and interface design
comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the
possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical
to fully understanding how to make something useful.Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product
that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about
what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be
possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a
screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low
priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to
be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high
priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost.
And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.
Obvious / easy / possible is a good filter through which to create — and critique — designs. To borrow an example from yesterday: old-fashioned analog light switches are exemplars of obviousness; most new-fashioned smart switches are exemplars of possibility.
