I was discussing with Ian Grant (Glasgow), Aidan Kelly (London East) and Björn Asmussen (Oxford Brookes) a previous post I published in French on the idea of simplicity. I was arguing that firms should take ease-of-use and soberness into account in their processes and design. Of course I had no real results to prove my point and it was merely an assumption, kind of intuition.

I can’t really say whether my fellow EMAC colleagues agreed with me but Björn came up with a striking example that I didn’t even mention in my post : web browsers. Do you remember the times of Altavista and Yahoo when web pages were crowded with pictures and words. Compare those designs with Google’s … what a difference.

Did you actually ever return on Altavista ? I did this for you and discovered that it pretty much changed from what it used to be 10 years ago. Look at this !