sad to watch great software die a slow death by way of complexity seeping into every crevice. simplicity is worth defending. notion, figma, and spotify all prime examples. RIP

Product Designer at aragon.org ⟡ Cyclist ⟡ Music Nerd ⟡ Sourdough dad

🎯🎯🎯 https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

These softwares are business-driven opportunities, which leads to the fact that you expand the user groups and want to serve anybody in the same way (to save cost), even though you would be able to separate the UX based on user. It mostly gets worse because of hypercapitalism is expanding widely.

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Head of Design @decentdao

I think the short answer is: it's hard, and it depends.

Certainly not opposed to products evolving and improving, but designers should be skeptical by default and know the difference between solving user problems and being hired hands in a feature factory. As you mentioned, pruning + maintenance plays a role too

I agree with every take in this thread but it makes me curious how does a designer committed to simplicity scale their design to meet evolving user needs without introducing complexity? 

Do you just cut off new features and build something new? IRL we see product extensions vs bloating existing products.

Product Designer | Prev Nifty Gateway | Tessera 


What's most frustrating in Spotify's case is that none of the added complexity even delivers value. Huge bummer

I want to cancel my Spotify subscription for this very reason. I just want to listen to music.

We are tennis coaches. What do you need to win? Find the answer, and worth from there.

And the chat button is one of the first to disappear on window resize 🫠

Can I add in the pro version of Zoom there’s 13 buttons across the bottom.

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My thoughts exactly. I'm increasingly inspired by single-purpose, well-crafted software. Home-cooked meal vs. mall food court

the ONLY people who need this level of search granularity are huge enterprise or agency organizations

figma is having money troubles post-adobe fiasco so makes sense they'd start creating more features for their power users (aka highest paying users)

sad indeed 🙁

Sapiens qui prospicit - Wannabe Polymath. Interested in art, music, history, philosophy and religion.

Fully agree. I often think about how hard it must be to try picking up Figma as a new user today. I've had the benefit of incrementing adapting to new features over time.

Simplicity was the reason I liked Figma. In contrast to the Adobe tools it was really easy, fast and had all the functionality I needed for UI design. Now it is more like Photoshop or illustrator.