5-Amita Avancha

Chapter 4 of designing the obvious discusses that designers tend to add too much unnecessary features to their designs, which in essence are "nice to have", however end up cluttering our design. This chapter advises us to recognize what is most important about our design by slicing our application down to its bare bones. We must ask questions to remind us what is most important about the use of the design such as, "does this feature contribute directly to the completion of the task?" For our project for last week we tried to simplify YouTube's design to focus mainly on the music. We chose to do this because after speaking with many users of YouTube we discovered that the main reason they use the site is to listen to music. In our new design we added related artists to the sides of the site with Artist's bios and lyrics to the song. After thinking about our design I realized that instead of adding cool new features it might have been more efficient if instead of focusing on lyrics and artist's bios we simplified the cluster on YouTube and just focus on highlighting the search bar and related music. This would make the site easier for users to use and find exactly what they are looking for. Simple design in this case would be more beneficial since, after listening to the group present in class, our group realized that it would have been better to make YouTube's sight have less "random things" everywhere.