There’s one universal rule that every startup and every entrepreneur should live by.  About a month ago, I asked, “are unoriginal ideas bad?”  And two people answered my question: the guy who started 37 Signals, and the guy who started YouTube.

And now I’m trying to convince the community of entrepreneurs that Keep It Simple should be in your list of “things we will gouge our eyes out for not doing.”  It’s not just something you do every once in a while and scratch off your to-do list.  Keep It Simple is a philosophy to live by, and it’s an extremely uncomfortable discipline.  Many companies survive by this philosophy alone, the most obvious example being Apple.  I’ll explain, although don’t mistake this for a “rant.”  I’m simply explaining what this means in my line of work.

I do a lot of design work on the web, and I work with a lot of clients.  The biggest misconception about design is that it’s all about “making something pretty.”  Design isn’t about slapping colors and text onto a palette and making it look pretty.  And many designers who know what they’re doing will be slightly offended if you try and wrap them up in a pretty little box like that.

Contrary to popular belief, and I officially dub this “Jared’s Design Philosophy,” but here it is: design is about the art and discipline of accomplishing more by using less.  There is a famous term in the design industry called whitespace.  It’s commonly used in other places because it’s extremely important, especially in today’s world of marketing and advertising that seems to pump so much material through a single message that you’re not even sure what’s being communicated.

When people are presented with the idea of whitespace, they get extremely uncomfortable and start to get fidgety.  They feel like money is being spent on doing nothing, so in their nervousness, they start asking for more stuff to fill in the spaces.  In my line of work, whitespace holds more importance than anything else.  And half my job as a designer isn’t even in the design work, it’s explaining to the client why this stuff matters.

Most of us are probably in the B2C space.  Even if you’re not, you need to keep it ridiculously simple.  Things are becoming more and more complex.  The designers (think Jonathan Ive) who know what they’re doing always preach Keep It Simple, but what’s the actual reason for doing that?  It’s not just for the sake of being simple.  It all comes down to a call to action.  You’re asking your users to buy from you, to sign up for an account, or to surrender their personal information.  But if you bombard them with too many calls to action and don’t give them enough room to breathe (whitespace), sorry, but your time is up.  And that person is gone, probably forever.

The real reason Keep It Simple is important: your users don’t have all the time in the world.  You need to ask them to do one or two things at most, at any given time.  Beyond that, they’re going to be so confused that the user experience is already negative.

So, even though I try and claim this one as my own, your high school teacher probably beat me to it.

Keep It Simple Stupid.

About the Author

Jared Tame is an entrepreneur who has worked with hundreds of clients on website design, marketing, and sales, and currently works with StartPal providing high-quality, low-cost website design and e-commerce solutions to small businesses and startups.