“We need to make it as simple as possible”. I’ve heard this countless times on dozens of projects. I get it, the intention is great and it’s a good guiding principle, but what does it really mean?

When spoken by a client or product owner, they’re often talking about minimalism. Let’s build a Minimum Viable Product! It’ll be quick and cheap! Maybe, but despite being lean and focused, MVPs often lack simplicity and that’s a real problem.

While simplicity aims to reduce complexity, minimalism is about reducing the elements to the strictest minimum, which often leads to confusion and accessibility issues.

Leaving aside the pitfalls of MVPs (maybe a future post) let’s take a couple of design examples:

• Favouring icons without text labels for aesthetic minimalism will cause your icons to be misinterpreted, which leads to indecision and confusion
• Using an off-the-shelf theme builder is a fast way to launch a public-facing site but it probably lacks character, is inaccessible, poorly SEO optimised and perhaps worst of all, feels cheap and ill-conceived

So how do we solve this? No matter the scale of your ambitions, embrace simplicity. The words you use matter, the first impression matters and ultimately, the experience of your audience should guide your definition of “simple”. Get your feedback loop in place.

• 3 options instead of 1 can be simpler, providing they’re relevant and prioritised
• 200 words formatted as a list can be simpler than a single 100 word paragraph
• Well written content without images or illustration will have more impact than a stylised page with dull content

It all comes back to the fact that pursuing minimalism for the sake of simplicity runs a high risk of being misunderstood.