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Do this:
- Put your right hand out in front of you, palm facing away, fingers pointing up.
- Tilt your hand 10 degrees counterclockwise.
- Now flex your wrist forward like you’re pushing a big button…a REALLY big button, about 6” in diameter.
- Now image there are four buttons like that. Press them all.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Doesn’t that feel awesome? The act of pushing huge buttons gives a wonderful sensation of control. Technology, reduced to its simplest form, is about as empowering as it gets. Why do game shows have contestants push huge buttons, or commercials for office supply company depict their services as easy as pushing a big button? Because it’s awesome.
My day job is to create toys for little kids, as in really little kids—under four years old. This requires boiling everything down to a minimum of features. On the other hand, I’m 50 years old, which means I have the perfect trifecta of poor eyesight, no patience, and the temperament of Larry David.
We’ve all seen enough bad Steve Jobs biopics (will there ever be a good one?) to know that obsession with simplicity is now a tech-industry cliché. The NeXT box may or may not have been a perfect cube, but who cares? Form is not function. Function is function.
If that makes no sense, try to make a game for a two-year-old. I’m serious. Make something up and give it to a kid—even better if they are riding a sugar high of birthday cake. This will give you a true sense of the need for simplicity.
If you’re in the business of designing our phones, our cable UIs, or our apps, simplicity is not in your vocabulary, and we all hate you. I’m sure you get abused by your tech-illiterate relatives at every family function. But if you care and want to make shit that’s easy to use, make something for a kid.
I was teaching cards to a two-year-old named Lucy. I tried showing her card games, but she kept ignoring my lessons to throw fish crackers across the living room. So I kept removing steps, making it simpler. Finally, we got to a game she liked, we called it “you get two cards, and then you win.” Stupid, right? You can almost hear the millennial parent angst, “How is that gonna get my kid into Harvard?”
But this simple game engaged her, and I got her attention. Little by little I added more features, like taking turns, the concept of colors, and this thing called pairs. Soon we were playing Go Fish.
Most designers don’t work this way, which is why there is such a cry to make things simpler. If you start with the absolute simplest product, you are much more careful about what you put into it. And like toys, you will make every feature count.
In the field of design, not everyone has the luxury of piling on feature after feature. Those of us in the toy industry have no choice but to start at zero and add features very judiciously. And make buttons really big. In the end, it’s a very liberating experience. The act of designing for a developing brain frees you from thinking like a fully functional adult, and it opens your mind to the most rudimentary sensations of humans.
Try it.
Please.
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Author, humorist, entrepreneur, coffee addict, Robert von Goeben is the founder of one of the fastest growing companies in the children’s products industry, Green Toys Inc., He founded Silicon Valley VC fund, Starter Fluid and was the head of Internet and online activity at Geffen Records. Von Goeben spends his time writing about entrepreneurship, small business, culture and general musings about random sh*t. He is the author of seven books including The VC: The Surreal World of Silicon Valley Capital.
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Photo: GettyImages