Since brevity is the soul of wit...

Rather than Chronicle HighEdWeb 2008 in minute-by-minute accounts, I thought I'd extract two themes relevant to me from my entire experience.  Today, in part to continue with my previous post comparing "Lost @ Penn State" to "Sesame Street Simple", my theme is simplicity.

I attended a variety of sessions across Applications & Standards; Marketing, Management, and Professional Development; Social Applications and Content; Technical: Propeller Hats Required; and Usability, Accessibility and Design.  One message that popped up across several of these, from presenters of all backgrounds, was the message that less is more.

Jeff Veen's Keynote, talked about the power of visualizing data, "to stop thinking about the numbers and see the patterns".  Data has real impact on us, not when we relay all the complexity of raw figures, but when we find a story we want to tell and "remove everything that isn't telling the story."  He talks about filtering our content for clarity.

In "Colors on the Web: Few Things, Great Results", Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel, Professor, University Anhembi Morumbi noted that "perfection is taking away".

In "Getting Them to The Table and Keeping Them There: Campus Web Redesigns", the presenters, Susan T. Evans and Joel W. Pattison of William and Mary, discussed how authors become attached to their content want to include everything noting that very few people know how to communicate effectively.  Their advice was to remind people who needed to improve an existing site was to keep reminding existing authors that this clutter is why users were critical of navigating the site in the first place.

Even one of the books recommended in "Get a Clue: Shift Happens" (presented by Gordy Pace, Director of IT Communications, The University of Montana) advocates simplicity.  "Made to Stick" suggests the following for making a message stick: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story.

These lessons in simplicity go beyond Web content, Web Design and data visualization. In any process that faces a customer, internal or external, your goal is to find your central message and remove everything that distracts from it.  Your work is done when there is nothing else you can take away.