Law 3: Time
Maeda's third law of simplicity is to save time:
The average person spends at least an hour a day waiting in line. Add to this the uncountable seconds, minutes, weeks spent waiting for something that might have no line at all.
Some of that waiting is subtle. We wait for water to come out of the faucet when we turn the knob. We wait for water on the stove to boil, and start to feel impatient. We wait for the seasons to change. Some of the waiting we do is less subtle, and can often be tense or annoying: waiting for a Web page to load, waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, or waiting for the results of a dreaded medical test.
No one likes to suffer the frustration of waiting. Thus all of us, consumers and companies alike, often try to find ways to beat the ticking hand of time. We go out of our way to find the quickest option or any other means to reduce our frustration. When any interaction with products or service providers happens quickly, we attribute this efficiency to the perceived simplicity of experience.
Achieving notable efficiencies in speed are exemplified by overnight delivery services like FedEx and even the ordering process for a McDonald's hamburger. When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. And we are thankfully loyal when it happens, which is rare (2006, Law 3: Time).
Reducing the time it takes to complete a technology initiative is complicated at best. The perfect technology initiative would be cheap, fast, and good, but in reality it is a good rule of thumb to assume that you can only achieve two of the three. Obviously, our goal is to have good technology initiatives and more often than not budgetary concerns mean that the cheap options are the attractive options, meaning that speed will be sacrificed. Maeda suggests that when time itself cannot be reduced that tricks can be used to reduce the impact of time spent waiting, one example of this being the progress bar used when computers are updating or installing new programs. The progress bar shows that the time we spend waiting is not wasted because it highlights the progress towards a goal.
The concept of a progress bar can be used in technology initiatives. If initiative organizers identify benchmark goals and track the progress to those benchmarks rather than only celebrating the end goal of successful implementation of the entire initiative. Leave a comment identifying five or six benchmark goals you have identified for your project. Then share a creative and public way to track the progress in reaching those benchmarks, if you don't have a creative idea borrow one from your peers and reply to their comment on why you think their idea will be successful.
"Savings in time feel like simplicity"