Where Bloggers Live: "Simple But Effective"

Welcome back to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live! I am lucky to have joined a terrific group of bloggers who give a peek into the places and spaces where they spend their time.

Today's topic is Things You'll Always Hear Me Say...and one of them is "This month, I will get a start on my Where Bloggers Live post early." I say it, but it never seems to happen! I always get started the day before it's due. This post is coming out late because I was knocked out by a migraine yesterday and accomplished nothing.

Another thing you'll hear me say is BUNNIES! Of course, this is a topic I've written about quite a bit on my blog in general and for Where Bloggers Live. So hard as it was, I decided I wanted to write about something else for this post.

The common phrase I use all the time for today's post is "Simple but effective." I will say it about any kind of human creation where the design doesn't have any/many elements that are complex, complicated, convoluted, intricate, technically difficult, unusual or wildly experimental, but serves its purpose well.

I'm going to discuss this in two contexts in my life, but I think the lesson is the same for many, many things:

#1: Simple but Effective at Work: Driving Understanding and Action

I first started thinking a lot about "simple but effective" during my career as a researcher/data analyst who developed and conducted surveys and experiments, created models, structured data sets, and communicated data and research findings in written and visual ways.

For example, at my last job, my group took a lot of our regular data reporting and replaced it with data dashboards that users can interact with.

One of the disagreements I sometimes had with other team members developing these dashboards was they thought that the dashboards needed to be cool, complicated, interesting, snazzy, or otherwise flashy in some way. They had difficulty articulating why that was necessary, but it seemed to stem from a variety of things ranging from "if it's not cool-looking, people won't be interested" to "I want to impress everyone (fellow developers and users) with my cool design they've never seen before."

What often happened was that in chasing "cool," they actually achieved "overly complicated, confusing, and chaotic" instead. You can imagine a website, right, in which you push buttons and shapes would shrink and grow, areas would change colors and fonts, and 3D rotating figures would sparkle with unicorn dust, but you couldn't really understand what it all meant and you couldn't easily find the answer to even basic questions. It's impressive in some way, to be sure, but it's not useful for the purpose.

When I presented my first set of dashboards to a group including fellow developers and the key group of users (who are not technical), my heart immediately sang because as soon as I pulled up the first dashboard on the presentation screen, the director of our core user group said, "Wait? What? Is that right? It is? How did I not know that?" about a small data table and basic bar graph. People immediately started hypothesizing about what was going on, and I was able to pull up data to test those hypotheses. It was BLISS because no one had a single thing to say about the design and layout of the dashboards because they were too busy using them. The dashboards were approved and went live for users with their "simple but effective" design.

Later, early on during the COVID pandemic that completely upended everything for our organization and all organizations like it across the country, our chief executive said to his leadership group in a meeting "I wonder what's happening with X [a very important data point for our organization]" in an idle way, not really expecting anyone to know. And that same director from my previous presentation pulled up the dashboards and showed them the first graph, which answered that question...and showed that the situation, which everyone expected was bad, was much worse than they had imagined. And so then that group started asking "What about this?" and "Is it because of this?" while the director pulled up the data. They spent the meeting hypothesis testing using the dashboards and coming up with ideas for how to improve the situation.

Later that same day, our executive was on a conference call with other executives across the country, and someone there said "I wonder what's happening with X." And our executive was able to tell them, "I was just looking at that data this morning with my leadership team, and here, the situation is A, B, C, and D, so we are working on 1, 2, and 3 in response." After a moment of people being astounded that anyone actually knew this, they started saying "This situation is even worse than I thought!" and then "Why don't I know this about my organization?!"

(I was not a part of any of these high-level meetings, obviously, but my own department's director was happy to fill me in.)

Right after this, news stories started appearing about the X situation, and I wasn't surprised to see the local news reporting on data from our dashboards (which our leadership would have shared when asked by reporters). But I was surprised (and delighted) to see our data all over the national news as well. Not because my organization is the biggest and most important in the country, but because we had the right data, at the right time, in a simple but effective format right at people's fingertips, that could answer a big and important question. (Later, as other organizations got their data together, we saw that our own organization was part of a bad nationwide trend.)

Toward the end of my time at that job, one of my developer colleagues told me that she had just previewed some of her dashboards for a user group, and they said "Can you make the first dashboard look the one that Sally uses for things like X, Y, and Z? We really like how clear that is as a starting point." (Whenever it made sense for the data, I liked to use that same introductory set up because my users were familiar with it and made it easy for them to jump right in rather than flailing about with something totally new. I actually standardized as much as I could across different content areas for the same reason.) Luckily, my co-worker was quite happy to implement that in her dashboards and passed this on to me as a compliment to my design.

I tell this story not to throw shade on my fellow developers or brag about myself (though yes, I recognize I am bragging, ha), but as an illustration that it's easy to get in a mindset where you think everything has to look really complicated to be "impressive," when the truth is, simple but effective is often the best.

The thing is, in this particular example, there was a lot of complexity behind those simple but effective dashboards. The data connections, the calculations, the way different pieces were tied together...it was complicated under the hood. I had also put a lot of thought into how to create something that would give a good overview and also allow users to move deeper and deeper into the data. But the part that users saw was clean and simple, direct and easy to use and understand.

#2: Simple but Effective at Play: Creating Beauty with Intent

When I started watching jewelry-making videos on YouTube, I was quite struck when a very experienced designer [I wish I could remember who!] commented on a simple beaded necklace that she was making, "Not every design you make has to be a demonstration of every technique you've ever learned." To me, that was a strong statement in favor of simple but effective design, and it's something I think about when I putting together a piece of jewelry (or a set of jewelry).

Let me be clear, I make a lot of simple beaded jewelry! And (if I do say so myself) it looks great! And oftentimes, that's not despite its simplicity, but because of its simplicity. Often the beads and findings we are working with are so gorgeous in themselves that a simple design allows you to really appreciate the beauty of those component pieces. Simple designs also allow the deliberate choices of colors, shapes, sizes, materials, etc. to have a high impact.

This is not to say that complicated jewelry is wrong or not as good - of course complex designs are also terrific! But once again, it doesn't have to be complicated, difficult, unusual, novel, or experimental to look wonderful.

Sometimes I think those of us who engage in creative hobbies need to remind ourselves that it's OK if something was easy to make or a simple, basic design we've done before. It's not "cheating" to make something that isn't technically difficult! You can have 30 years of experience making beaded jewelry and make a piece that is no more difficult than an absolute beginner could do, and that does not undermine anything. No matter how basic the techniques or simple the design, you are still using your own creative vision, taste, and style to put things together so that the resulting product is meaningful, impactful, has the vibe you're going for, and suits the purpose.

Interested in some easy jewelry tutorials? Check out post 1 and post 2 of my simple but effective earrings designs, as well as more tutorials listed here.

Next month's topic is 5 Simple Fall Pleasures I Live For...and fall fashion and fall-themed jewelry is probably one of them!

In the meantime, visit these lovely bloggers as they share about the things you'll always hear them say:

Bettye at Fashion Schlub

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks

Em at Dust and Doghair

Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style

Leslie at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After Again

Iris, always in our hearts, from Iris' Original Ramblings

Now to you: What is something we'll always hear you say? Do you agree with the "simple but effective" idea? Where do you like to keep it simple vs. more complex? How does simplicity vs. difficulty play out with your creative hobbies?

Blogs I link up with are listed here.