Keeping it simple

I'm not a UX designer. But I'm lucky enough to work with some of the best in the world in Each&Other.

One of the things that they constantly do is reduce complexity and strive to keep things simple for the end user. We often don't realise when something is well designed. We expect things to work. However, we do notice when they don't, be it a website, software or physical product.

Recently, we started using Sifter to track bugs on a software project. Now, we'd used it before, but not for a few years, as on most of the projects we work on, our clients or partners had other tools for us to use.

Overly complex issue tracking software makes work hard. Sifter helps software & site development teams focus on doing what matters.

In this case, and to avoid Excel (ouch) we decided to use Sifter. 

I had forgotten what a great tool it is. It's just so simple to set-up and use. It boils issue tracking down to its essence – for me one of the marks of great design.

The reason we had started using it was that we were waiting for Jira to be set-up for the project. That's done now and we're using Jira, and the difference between the two products is chalk and cheese. 

Now I know that Jira, as part of a wider platform, does a whole bunch of other stuff besides tracking issues but when I opened it up it was an assault on the eyes. Where do you look? It's so busy. It has a WYSIWYG editor – why? It seems to have 158 fields – why? I'm sure a lot of this can be configured, but who's got time for that?

Sifter, on the other hand has what I consider to be the essentials. Issue Number, Title, Description, Attachments, Opener, Assignee, Status, Priority. There are other fields but for most projects, these eight are all you need.

But what I found really interesting was that Sifter had hardly changed in the 3-4 years that I haven't used it. In contrast and like many digital products, Jira seems to change regularly, adding features and not always for the better. The dreaded feature creep.

There are lessons here for anyone involved in digital design. The big challenge is in making the complex simple. To help do so, ask the hard "why" questions. In the case of software like this – do you really, really need that field... A few customers might, but if you give in to the requests of a few customers you can quickly end up with bloated software that's harder to use and harder to maintain.

In fairness to Sifter, they have really stuck to their core principles and quite simply kept it simple.

#ux #uxdesign #keepitsimple #sifterapp