Simplicity: Something We Can Agree On

I’ve spent the last two days at Enterprise Strategies for Location Intelligence.  It was an interesting collection of vendors and enterprise end users.  It was encouraging to hear the enterprises in the audience say the agenda hit the areas where they had questions. Across these conversations some interesting meme’s emerged.

One, a general interest in data external to the enterprise – spanning crowdsourcing and open data to social/mobile. Large players from IBM, ESRI to Oracle all gave the theme attention. A second trend that was oft repeated – the convergence of business intelligence, location intelligence, GIS, data science, and a dozen more labels. As enterprises have begun to open themselves up to new concepts and data sources you get a collision of content.  Yet, the biggest “ask” I heard, when speakers talked about customers, was more simplicity in the myriad of offerings.  Almost every vendor highlighted the customer demand for simplicity.  Yet, the convergence of data that is being highlighted would seem to be the antithesis of simplicity.

Andrew sent me a cool quote last night that I think sums up the end goal well:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

- Antoine de Saint Exupery

I think this is one of the single biggest challenges we face as a community. As location becomes ubiquitous how do we make the new and old tools of geographic information more palatable as they need to interconnect and become more accesible to a broader ecosystem.  Traditionally, I’d argue that simplicity has not been the leading priority in either GIS or business intelligence.  This is shifting, in our panel SJ Camarata noted ESRI’s push to prioritize simplicity in the GIS market. This was one of many signals to me that simplicity is a goal the community could all benefit from, but what is the design philosophy for achieving it.

A big chunk of Google’s presentation at ESLI was their focus on simplicity – driven by user testing. Sean Maday quoted that in 30 minutes there will be 21,000 hours of Google Maps usage by the public.  Leveraging that mass of users opens up lots of opportunities for A/B testing, and the crowd quickly let’s you know what is simple and what is not. It has no doubt been massively successful, but having the crowd and resources of a Google can be challenging to come by.

Developing applications at GeoIQ we spend a lot of time thinking about simplicity, and thought it might be useful to share our design method. Over on the GeoIQ developer blog Matt Constantine has written up in depth over view of his design approach, along with a host of useful resources.  Simplicity is a perpetual goal and one of the tenants we can all strive for in our apps. Would love to hear other thoughts on achieving simplicity in applications as our data gets more complex.