While the notion of invisible or boring design isn’t new — after all Dieter Rams’ 10th principle is: good design is as little design as possible — designing for simplicity still seems to be difficult. As designers and creative people, it’s easy to get caught up in the magic of making and the minutia of details.

Making something simple is hard, and it takes discipline. Our goal as designers is to inspire feelings of satisfaction or delight by meeting a need or solving a problem. It shouldn’t be about keeping people’s attention. Instead, success should look like reducing anxiety or giving people a way of doing things they didn’t know was possible. Or, allowing people to do something faster, to feel more carefree, or to be more independent.

Giving people less work and worry, and more joy and convenience is what makes your product memorable. And, making a memorable experience is what feeds us as designers. As such, we need to view our role as one that enables people to achieve those outcomes of increased fulfillment and satisfaction.

Here are seven principles I work by to ensure design feels simple and helps people meet their goals.

1. Get familiar with your customer’s mindset and motivation

If we’re designing to enable an outcome — more joy and less worry — then we must have a deep and rich understanding of what is and isn’t working for people. The trick is that your customer won’t tell you, “x needs to be easier,” or “I wish there was a better way to y.”

It’s critical to develop empathy for our customers, and to be familiar with their mindset and motivations. Let’s take transportation for example.

Why do different people prefer to drive their own car for some errands, but use a ride-hailing service or public transit for others? What if they have a toddler, if it’s late at night, or if they need to make a few stops? Talking to a variety of people about these kinds of questions will put you in their shoes. People consider their goals and circumstances before they use a product, and we need to know what those are so that we know how to make something easy for them.

2. Create focus by clarifying your purpose

Inspired by a deep empathy for our customers, in the thick of product definition and feature roadmaps, we often plan for more features to address problems or indulge cool new ideas. How can we make something simple when there are so many problems to solve? You don’t need to solve every problem for everyone.

Find an area where you can specialize and have a significant impact. The Pareto principle, or 80/20 rule, applies in design and it’s been a guide through some of the trickiest decisions I’ve encountered. Basically, 80% of the time your customers are only doing 20% of what you offer.

That’s why you design for the 80% scenario, which is only a handful of use cases. Make those sing. Clear the path for near-zero friction. Get those right.

Of course, you should always address the 20%, or edge cases, with best practices so that you keep your customers’ trust. But don’t let the low-likelihood ‘what-if?’ compromise your chance to offer the best possible experience most of the time.

3. Reduce noise with system-based design

A strong system is the foundation for consistent, simple design. Consistency is a hallmark of good design because it reduces complexity and builds trust. A design system leverages repeatable and familiar patterns for your audience, which removes guesswork and lets your product’s purpose shine through.

You don’t need to invent a new way of interacting to be innovative and memorable. Invest in defining clear guidelines, setting your guardrails, and sticking to them so that your customer feels confident and focuses more on their goals than trying to make sense of the unfamiliar.

If you are creating a way of interacting that’s new (heck, we do that sometimes!), then the need for a system is even stronger so that your customer can gain confidence and learn each time they use your product.

4. Clue in to your customer’s context

Even with clear priorities and a strong system in place, it’s hard to make a robust product feel simple. Enter context — a designer’s best friend. Your goal as a designer is to clear the way for your user to realize their intention as easily as possible.

You will never be able to read their mind, but you can tune into their needs based on everything you know about them to cater their experience.

Are they a repeat user or is this their first time? Where are they in their larger journey? Did they finish what they were doing the last time they came? Will they do that again? What time of day is it? Are they late for something? With other people? What’s the weather like?

Depending on your product, these kinds of questions might be relevant and can inform how you structure your customer’s journey to present a set of relevant options catered to their current mindset and moment.

I like to offer three things they’ll likely want to do, rather than 20.  If they’re essential but not everyday features (like a permission setting), then consider tucking them away under a menu.

Remember that you’d rather have your product do a handful of things really well, than a so-so job at many.

5. Put time on your side

You’re focused on the most critical use cases. You’ve got a strong system. You’re paying attention to your customers’ context and usage patterns. As needs emerge for more feedback and features, make sure you’re not forgetting the fourth dimension in experience or product design — time .

Leveraging the temporal is like the atomic level of context-sensitive design. You can address so many needs in a customer’s journey with just-in-time information, options, or feedback that responds to their smallest interactions.

Think of auto-complete search suggestions that appear and disappear at the stroke of each letter. Or hint text in a form field. Options that reveal under your finger when you swipe an email in your inbox list, or rest your finger on a like button.

These are all examples of temporal, context-sensitive features that respond to the user’s slightest interactions to make things feel easy and natural. By layering the options and suggestions in time, the design feels simple and intuitive.

6. Leverage human senses and the current environment

Since so many products are digital, it’s easy to design only for a four-sided visual interface. Remember that your customer uses that screen in a big and messy world. They’re with people and usually doing other things while they’re using your product.

If your product is screen-based, find opportunities to layer the experience using media like sound and haptics (vibration on a phone), and other interactions like voice or gesture. By using different media together, you provide some relief from one mode of interacting and minimize overloading the screen with everything you want to communicate.

But make sure these are additive and don’t let your experience depend on them since some of your customers may have limited or no vision or hearing. For that reason, also ensure you design inclusively and follow a11y best practices .

Think of yourself as the conductor and your product’s surfaces as the orchestra. Use them together in harmony, and remember that they work together to create an experience bigger than any one touchpoint. How can haptics in your app create subtle feedback to support your design system? How can audio help your customers read an environment or know when a transition is happening?

7. Edit edit edit

Reduce your design to the most essential elements and words to create focus and calm for your customer.

Sometimes design doesn’t need words at all. But, when it does, it requires an investment in UX writing. Why? People don’t read. At best, they scan.

Every word needs to be right for the reader so you need to understand the words they use. Do people “launch” apps? Probably not. They might say “open” or “start” apps. Do people “enable” things? Chances are they simply turn them on.

These differences matter. As designers, we live in a world with its own language that’s often pretty jargon-filled. So stay in touch with how everyday people speak and match your language.

Try testing the reading level of initial drafts with Hemingway or Readable apps, then test proposed options with actual users. To help with scanning, messages also need to be presented in the appropriate hierarchy.

Start with formatting and style best practices from existing guides like Google’s Material and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, but then document and develop your own. Establish, and record, what words work best for your product and experience so that language becomes consistent and follows repeatable patterns too.

The challenge of unlocking new possibilities for people in simple and human ways is what inspires me most about design. It’s hard to do, but it’s our job to create simple, delightful products that promise a better outcome than what came before.

At Waymo, we’re building something that gets people where they want to go, safely and comfortably, while also requiring less of them on the journey. That new freedom is for riders to use as they please. They can talk and text on their phone, put on makeup, stare out the window, eat, even sleep!

That’s the outcome my team and I aim to deliver — more time for yourself, more freedom to do as you please, more independence, and hopefully, more joy. And I use these seven principles to do it.

3 key lessons I’ve learned as a (mostly) unsuccessful businessman

Since I got started in 2010, I’ve been a part of fifteen unsuccessful business projects. You could say, therefore, that my business career has mostly featured failure.

But without the lessons I learned along the way, I never would have been able to get to the point of running one of the hottest startups in e-transportation, which is even making a splash around the world by selling record-breaking electric bikes.

So here are the three key lessons to success… which I’ve learned through a whole lot of trial and error. Have a read and hopefully you will be able to save yourself a whole lot of grief, trouble, and money.

1. Sell things that customers actually want, rather than what sounds cool to you

I moved to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in 2010 to found best.ua, a service analogous to Yelp. At the time, this market was still open and fertile ground and hadn’t been taken over by companies like Google and Foursquare. While working on this project, I realized that Kyiv had no service like Opentable with which people could reserve tables at the restaurants whose profiles we hosted.

It quickly became clear that to do this, we needed to create not simply a reservation button, but a whole CRM system with which restaurants could manage all their available tables and their reservations. We had to replace their time-tested pen-and-paper system.

Even after expending months of effort to build a better, digital system, many restaurant administrators just kept using what they knew best. That should have been a hint.

As often happens whenever a company tries to update its standard operating procedures, there was a learning curve for both our restaurant partners and their customers. Restaurant patrons didn’t yet appreciate the convenience of booking a table in seconds, 24/7, from anywhere with an internet connection. The restaurants didn’t see why they needed to change their booking management protocols when people could just call ahead for reservations like they always had.

In our post-mortem analysis, we found that only about a dozen of Kyiv’s 2000+ restaurants had enough of a problem with their bookings to make our system worthwhile. We spent large amounts of resources constructing a business solution that our customer base wasn’t even asking for in the first place.

Four years later, despite starting with a legitimately solid business idea, I had to cut my losses and sell best.ua. Other restaurant/business review and reservation solutions would spring up and become successful, but they wouldn’t be mine.

2. If your customer wants to buy something, sell it to them!

My current venture, Delfast, is known for its record-breaking e-bikes, but we actually began in 2014 as a delivery startup (hence our name: Del[ivery]fast). We wanted to make one-hour delivery feasible all around Kyiv. Ebikes were our obvious choice of vehicle.

We initially bought our delivery riders the first ebikes we could find, but had poor results. We needed bikes that would carry our couriers about 150-200 kilometers a day on a single charge — in cold, rough Ukrainian riding conditions.

But we soon found none of the bikes on the market could fit the bill. Desperate for a solution, we started building our own bikes, instead. And they worked great!

After a couple of years of operating our delivery business and having figured out our ideal bike solution, word was getting around that we had strong, quality ebikes with a top-of-the-line battery range. We started receiving requests to buy our delivery bikes, which I had no interest in.

At one point, it got so ‘bad’ that I literally had to put up a sign on the door of our headquarters saying that we did not sell ebikes . It took me a year to realize that we were staring directly at organic demand for something we were producing, and yet choosing to ignore it!

In 2017, we decided to take our bike to Interbike Expo in Las Vegas, and we got an amazing reception. We started a campaign on Kickstarter to bring our bikes to the consumer market. We set a goal of $50,000 but ultimately raised $165,000.

The organic demand for our long-distance ebikes convinced me that we had a real, viable business idea on our hands. Producing high-quality, long-range ebikes in a world that wants green transport options offered Delfast a chance to carve out an attractive, sustainable niche in an industry where we had already proven our competence and real demand for our product.

We sold our delivery business in 2020, and are now focused entirely on making world-class ebikes.

3. If you want to enter a crowded marketplace, you need a killer competitive advantage

As I was preparing to launch our crowdfunding campaign, I chatted with my friend, who had managed to raise over $1 million over six Kickstarter campaigns. He pressed me on what made our ebikes worth supporting.

I thought that our ebike and the technology in it spoke for themselves, but then he pulled up Kickstarter and Indiegogo to show me 20 results that popped right up when he searched for ‘electric bicycle.’ He made me understand that Delfast needed а killer competitive advantage that set our bikes apart from a crowded field, or we would get nowhere.

In his book It Won’t Be Easy , Ben Horowitz writes that a startup’s main task is to create a product ten times better than what’s available on the market. It wasn’t physically possible to offer an ebike ten times lighter than the competition, and it wasn’t economically possible to create one ten times cheaper. So we decided to focus on range.

Even our earlier-stage bicycles had a range that was far better than 99% of what was on the market. Our competitors’ ebikes were able to go 30-40 kilometers without pedaling before needing a recharge. What we needed to do was engineer an ebike that could blow those numbers out of the water, and we did exactly that.

When we road-tested our first marketable prototype, we hired the world record holder for balancing on an unmoving bicycle, to ride our bike as far as he could on the highway from Kyiv to the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv. When the battery gave out, our bike had carried him 380 kilometers, even beating out the normal range of a Tesla at the time!

At a later test at the Kyiv Velodrome, Vitaly rode our bike 367.037 kilometers, which was good enough to be certified as a Guiness World Record . With those achievements, we had our killer advantage. News outlets started picking up our story, and the customers and investors really started coming in.

Conclusion

Mr. Horowitz was right when he said that success in innovative business isn’t easy. It took me many years and many failures to get myself and my company to the place where they are now.

But if you remember to listen to the market and to your customers, and to transform your product strengths into a really valuable competitive advantage, you’ll be well on your way to making a big splash in the world, and a lot of money along with it.

The best career advice: Be yourself… and don’t tell jokes?

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

Once upon a time, I was hired by a company and given the title ‘general manager’ of a business unit. I was 30, had started two companies before, but had never felt like a manager or knew what was expected from a manager.

So what did I do? I panicked.

I started looking around me to see what the other managers were doing. I noticed they carried leather-bound notebooks and wore suits… so I bought a suit and a notebook.

I basically tried to emulate the other managers as much as possible, but I felt awful and insecure every step of the way because none of it felt natural to me.

One day I broke down and confessed to my own manager that I had no idea what I was doing.

He smiled and said “Boris, we already have 10,000 managers here. We don’t need another one that looks and acts like the ones we already have. We hired you for your unique skills and personality. So stop trying to act like a manager and just be yourself.”

You can imagine the immense relief I felt when I heard him say that and how much better I felt about myself.

But why am I going on about this? Well, I was reminded of this time in my life when I saw this tweet:

My first thought was “yes, that’s brilliant!”

If you have someone applying for a job, and the chemistry is so good you can have a laugh together from the start, I’d definitely consider that a good sign!

…but then I also thought about all the bad presentations I’ve seen in my life.

We’ve all seen presentations where the person has clearly read somewhere that ‘you should always start with a joke.’ So despite it not being natural to them, they take their shot at standup comedy and fail miserably — making the whole thing excruciatingly awkward.

Starting a presentation with a joke — or making a joke during a job interview — are incredibly scary and risky things to attempt, and I would never give this as general advice to anyone.

But what would be my general advice? Do what makes you feel at ease.

A friend and colleague of mine of ten years recently announced she’s leaving my company. After I overcame my disappointment we started chatting about how she had applied for her new job. Turns out, she didn’t…?

I laughed out loud at the story, as it seemed so naive and absentminded — but I also quickly realized that this probably helped her land the job.

She must’ve looked confident and come across as a person who’s easy to get along with during the interview. And that’s because she IS confident and easy to get along with.

I understand this advice is much more complex than just saying ‘start with a joke’ — but that’s just how it is. You are unique and I hope you’ll find a company or team that recognizes your uniqueness. And if they don’t, then the job probably isn’t right for you.

But also, always start your presentation with a joke.

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for his newsletter here .