Less is More ?

There has been a lot of talk about "less is more" in context of the functionality offered within a software. I think the real point is no that less is more but that there is an appropriate amount. More functionality offers more power and flexibility to users, but where it fails is how it is designed and offered to the user.

One thing we talk about at my company is how Apple OSX is easy enough to be used by an older - non tech savvy person yet if someone wants to do much more , they could go right into the unix shell.

So there are two 'different' challenges:
1. Since we cannot do everything on day 1, what is the functionality we start with?
2. Within that functionality how do we design the tasks in a manner that it best aligns with people's needs. That one should be offered edit option preciously when they need
it - not before, not after

This ends up meaning that all that user can do is not displayed on the screen all the time. On the contrary , my belief is that "Most" of it is hidden and is activated preciously when user needs it.

Now to gain precise knowledge of user's requirements we get into two main spaces:
1. Do something standard that applies to most people.
e.g. - most people would click on the icon to launch an application

2. Personalize based on user behavior
e.g. - Omnigraffle has this interesting feature where if one copies an element from one canvas and pastes in another one, then it pastes it at different locations each time. The software believes that user is intelligent and is repeating a task for a reason, so it doesn't just bring same result for same action, but tries different possibilities (paste in same place, paste in center, paster after same distance as last item copies was from it's original etc..)





And I think that's where the core approach lies.. consider your users to be intelligent. They'll explore and find the right stuff. The "down arrow" is a great visual in this regard probably used most often on the web. Have a look at following examples:

Apple - Pages
This is is the styles list that appears in Pages. Notice the down arrow on the right side ..













the down arrow seem a very clickable element (affordance is high). User naturally figures out a menu hidden underneath












And then ofcourse the pagination style of apple products:

Notice the circles above thumnails - do we really need to label them?