Design

Do We Need a Director of Simplicity?

Simple is one of the hardest concepts for companies to master. With more products, features and messages than ever, it’s in a brands best interest to be simple. So who owns simple in a business?

Do We Need a Director of Simplicity? Originally written on November 29, 2012 and it will take about 2 minutes to read

Simple is one of the hardest concepts for companies to master. With more products, features and messages than ever, it’s in a brands best interest to be simple. So who owns simple in a business?

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

– Leonardo DaVinci

We can first look at the product team. It’s their job to take the market’s problems, hypothesize the best way to solve them, get a designer involved and kick it over to dev and eventually QA. So does the designer define simplicity, the QA team, development the product owner? Is a product all there is?

What about marketing? The marketing team understands their buyer, takes the product features and binds them to buyer problems, they design collateral/websites/whathaveyou that convert, write copy that is easy to understand and take action with, worry about SEO/CPC and whole bunch of other stuff. The marketing team surely wants to keep things simple enough to be easily understood by buyers and customers, do they alone carry the simple torch?

I guess what I’m getting to is this: Do we need someone who looks at the whole simple picture and brings it all together?

From the product through marketing would it benefit to have an overlord with technical, design & marketing chops to align simplicity? There are a lot of people that get their hands on the product and marketing which can always lead to mis-alignment. What do you think, is it necessary, is there someone who should own simplicity over another?

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