Software industry is constantly re-inventing itself. It’s almost like any other fashion – things are in, then out but just a couple of years later they are in again. We’ve had command line user interfaces first, then the graphical ones (all hail mighty mouse) and now command line-like ones again. Look at just two well-known examples: Google home page and Windows Vista start menu. Both rely on a single piece of UI – the edit box. On the other hand, Vista disposes with another (physically) hard-to-navigate concept – hierarchical tree of menus, but let’s leave that for another time.

In a recent blog post Jeff cites several interesting pieces on UI friction. When is it possible to reduce the UI to something simpler, even to a single edit box? If Google can do it, can we too?

A broad question like this results in a typical answer: it depends. If it has to do with searching, you probably can. I find it a bit funny to point out at an example more than 12 years old. To the left you can see a screenshot from an application I used to work on. The app mainly draws nice charts of stock/futures data. It can connect to multitude of data sources and thus a multitude of exchanges. Searching for a particular symbol (for example Microsoft’s stock price) can be quite daunting. But there was a shortcut – just start typing and if what you’ve entered is uniquely identified, it will be used. Click on a screenshot to the left to see how it looks like. In fact, this is just like Google’s I feel lucky button. I remember using this all the time, users loved it.

But if the UI is not just for searching you can’t simply remove pieces of it and expect improvement. This is somewhat like compressing a compressed file – the file won’t get smaller, it might even become bigger. As always, apply common sense. With the apologies to Albert Einstein: make the UI as simple as possible, but no simpler.