Over-Innovation: A Cautionary Tale

There’s a tale often told in design circles of how, in the heat of the space race, NASA paid over a million dollars to develop a pen that worked in zero gravity. The Russians, however, took a different approach. They used a pencil.

It’s the kind of story we want to believe. How great would it be if there were an inexpensive, head slapping, “why didn’t I think of that” solution to all of our design problems? It’s true that we can fall into a trap of “over-innovating”—finding complex solutions when a simpler solution would do. After all, from the perspective of most users, simpler is better. Who wants to spend hours devouring a manual on a new product or software package? What we want is to have something so elegant, easy, and intuitive to use that no manual is needed.

But there’s the catch. Simple and elegant are not one and the same. While elegant may look simple, it’s usually the result of a lot of development. Elegant performs and is simple to use. Simple doesn’t always perform. What we really need is a simple user experience, not a simple product.