Zuckerberg’s Notebook

Over-engineering the user experience is a common trap to all fall into. Most web applications break Evan Williams’ Universal Law of Simplicity by providing too many features and not hanging those features on a solid framework of use cases.

This is where Facebook has always been awesome. The user experience is un-cluttered and very firmly focussed on the social flow. Everything hangs together. No matter what nook and cranny of the site I find myself in, I can tell that someone knows where they are sending me.

But there’s no doubt about it: simple is difficult.

It takes long, deep thinking to connect all the moving parts, including anticipating and learning from the users to plot a reasonably direct course to simplicity. Oh, and patience.

I enjoyed watching Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed at SXSW because we saw another glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook. It turns out Zuckerberg keeps notebooks. These aren’t the scrawled, disposable RAM that I create. These are the paper equivalent of a hard disk where everything is stored and indexed for future retrieval. They are metaculously kept and often referenced and updated some 4 years after an original entry.

This is what it takes to keep it simple.

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