I have seen Don Norman’s books on the desks of countless fellow Web creative types. I’ve read “The Design of Everyday Things,” and I liked it. So I felt a little strange to be so strongly disagreeing with one of his recent posts, titled “Simplicity is Highly Overrated,” on his site, jnd.org. He’s telling us that we shouldn’t make things simple, because people feel better about buying something when they have a lot of options.

It may just be me, but there are two things I disagree with in that idea: 1) that the best way we can measure usability is whether or not people want to buy something, and 2) that people really do want to buy things that are more complicated (or, with reference to the last post, that have a lot of “options”).

1) According to people who know, focus groups are a terrible way to do market research, simply because people tell you what they think they want, rather than what they would actually use. And people notoriously misreport their own behavior, not necessarily through any fault of their own. It’s pretty clear that this is similar to the place they are when they’re buying something new. Norman might say “who are we to tell people what they want?” My position is that he’s thinking backward: we should make devices or sites that work well, and see what people like in the long run, rather than catering to what they think important before using it.

2) It’s clear that people often choose simpler products anyway. The iPod is a great example–here’s a device that doesn’t have an FM tuner, that only interacts with the software designed for it, that has an extremely limited interface. But the flip side is that it does what it’s designed to do exquisitely well. And it’s hard to say that it’s been a failure.

Joel Spolsky agrees with Norman, and dismisses many of the aspects of simple design as features themselves, as if they were added on later, rather than being integral to the design of a simple, usable product. Well, I guess if “clean, spare design,” “fast response time,” and “putting the user in control” are features, a blank piece of paper is packed with features. Those paper developers were pretty canny marketers.

I’m afraid that both Norman and Spolsky are kind of missing the point. You want something to work well, and if a bunch of extra doodads make that more difficult, or time-consuming, or more expensive, well, don’t add the doodads. That’s all.