When Less Is Truly More

As a self-proclaimed “un-tech-y” person who works alongside certified tech geniuses, I often find myself asking an embarrassingly high number of questions each day.

What does that mean?

How did you make it do that?

Am I the only one confused here?

The thing is, I’m not incompetent when it comes to technology. As a millennial, I was born into a world where tech is woven into every aspect of our lives. Along with my peers, I’m (probably) lightyears ahead of many people when it comes to the more “general population” tech stuff, like iPhones, Microsoft Office, and how to change a .pdf to a word document (something every one of my family members over 40 seem to have trouble with).

But when it comes to programming and all those other complex areas of tech?

Forget it.

I always thought it would be interesting to learn about coding and the backend of all the programs I use every day, but my mind just doesn’t work that way. And I’m not the only one.

The problem with so many of the apps and services of our time is that they’re built by extremely tech-savvy people with the capacity to understand exactly how everything works, how it was built, and how to use it. They may have difficulty remembering what it was like before they had all that information — aka the position most of us are in all the time.

It’s in these situations when we can all be reminded about the joy of simplicity.

Doing Less @ Monitive

As the new Monitive: Freyja has been in development over the last year, I’ve had the fun role of being the “non-techy person” who can tell the “techy people” when something doesn’t make sense. It’s an easy part for me to play, considering how little I actually know about uptime monitoring.

Along with their patience in the midst of all my questions, what I’ve appreciated most about working with the Monitive team is their dedication to doing less. Creating a simple interface that works perfectly and is easy to understand is the top priority.

I can think of countless apps and services I’ve tried in my lifetime that had way too much going on and ended up making me more stressed and confused. I’m sure that wasn’t the goal of whoever the developers were, but it was the end result.

Although it’s easy to understand the appeal of adding features that help the end user get the most out of whatever is being built, what happens when it gets too overwhelming and they just quit? A quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery comes to mind here:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

When all the unnecessary extras have been removed, what’s left is simple, intuitive, and does exactly what it was meant to in the first place. Nothing more, nothing less. The perfect setup to help you do… whatever it is you need to do.

Every end of the “techy” spectrum can understand that.

–Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash