The iconoclastic adman Howard Luck Gossage (1917-1969) once said that no matter how much data and analytics you can throw at your advertising, there’s one inescapable truth: “People don’t read ads. They read what interests them, and sometimes it is an ad.”

But it’s usually not an ad.

No one will argue that traditional ads have less influence now than ever. Over the last few decades, consumers’ attention has grown increasingly immune to advertising. They fast-forward through spots and flip past ads as a matter of reflex.

So what now?

Read more of idfive’s March’s whitepaper at Sponsored Content: An antidote for ad blindness?. If you enjoy learning informed design from idfive, then subscribe to our monthly whitepaper.

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Facebook has taken many steps to ensure the “quality” of each ad they show on their site is consistent and appropriate to all audiences. Some of their requirements will come as no surprise but others will make you stop and ask “What’s the big deal?” If you’ve ever stumbled along the Common Advert Mistakes page then you probably already know how much of a pain it can be to get passed the approval process while building your campaign’s structure but aren’t quite ready to finalize the ad copy or images. However it is a great form of quality control that standardizes and limits what advertisers can do and virtually levels the playing field for all of us.

Facebook has also developed strict rules a that only apply to dating services and which ones can or can’t advertise on Facebook. They’ve also set a strict set of guidelines on how they can a display their ads. Their Help Center is full of useful tools and resources, as well as, a complete list of reasons why your ads could be disapproved. I would suggest giving all this a good look before jumping head first into a Facebook Adverts campaign. It will save you a lot of time and effort later down the road when you can’t figure out why you haven’t cracked the “Facebook code”.

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I’m not the type to go searching for this type of thing and I just happened upon it on while reading Mashable. What I found to be interesting about StorageByMail is that aside from actually packing the box, you don’t have to do anything at all. The service allows you to print a pre-paid shipping label, attach images to your online catalog and track your packages’ departures and arrivals,  pretty cool if you ask me.  But this whole idea of remote storage got me thinking about how one might take this to the next level by digitally cataloging their entire lifely posessions through QR Codes, photos, a web database and remote storage. With a little know-how and the use of some helpful tools like Belongsto.me and StorageByMail one could conceivably digitize their life and store it away for a later date.

To me this is appealing but I wonder if there is a market out there for this type of comprehensive service. Would people be willing to share this information with others like they do on Facebook? This is certainly something I’m sure most of us will be doing in the future as the cost per square foot continues to rise and our landscape becomes even more limited.

Hmm…I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

PS – if you’re looking for something to tidy of that digital audio library of your’s you might want to check out TidySongs which comes highly recommended and is free!

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Law 3: Time. Savings in time feels like simplicity. How many times have you been waiting in line only to think about all the things you could be doing instead of waiting in line? No one likes to wait so we often try to find ways to “beat” time. Have you ever taken a back way home when you know traffic on the fastest way home is backed up? Sometimes the back way home isn’t necessarily faster but the fact that you are not sitting still in bumper-to-bumper traffic has a way of making it seem simpler.

Let’s think of other ways technology has trimmed the amount of waiting off your day. You can go to any number of websites to purchase books, toys, etc. When you add an item to your online shopping cart you often will get a list of suggested items that other shoppers have purchased. Sure you could disregard the suggestions, but why would you if it saves you time?

Many of the popular apps available to SmartPhone users have been designed to save us time by simplifying the use of the phone, mostly as it pertains to grabbing information from the web. The screen on the phone is small, and the phone’s browsers can be hard to navigate. These apps take us to the information quickly and simply. The saved time feels simpler because it is.

In today’s world we have become very accustomed to instant gratification. My husband and I ofter refer to the kids today as the “Now” generation. They don’t know what it’s like to have to wait until you get home to give your friends a call or have to wait until prime time to watch their favorite tv shows. They can text or call their friends any time of the day if they want or they can record their shows and watch them whenever their hearts desire.

Sometimes you might feel like you’re saving time when you’re actually not saving any time at all, because your expectations have been met. For instance, many interstates these days have the digital roadsigns that during heaving traffic tell you how much time it will take you to get to the next exit. If you know it’s going to take eight minutes then your expectations have been managed. If you have no idea how long it will take you to get to the next exit, then you will naturally be worried that it will take much longer than you think because we don’t often think the best outcome will happen.

Maeda says, “when time is saved—or appears to have been—the complex feels simpler.” So the next time your standing in line, take a look around to see if that store has taken into account any ways to make the waiting time more tolerable. If they haven’t, pull out your phone and get something done quickly that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to accomplish in line. You’ll feel better about your experience… at least until someone has to nudge you forward because you haven’t noticed the line move.

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Law 2: Organize – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer. This only holds true if the number of groups is less than the number of items to be organized. An example of this would be your closet. If it is organized by groups like shirts, pants, dresses, etc. then you are using the process Maeda refers to as SLIP: Sort, Label, Integrate, and Prioritize.

Sort: Look for natural groupings. In the case of your closet it would be natural to put all your shirts together, all your pants together, etc. Once your items have been sorted, the next obvious step would be to Label the groups.

Once your objects are labeled, you can Integrate groups that appear to be the same into larger groups, while simultaneously some of the existing groups might make more sense being broken apart into their own groups.  An example of a group that could be integrated would be coats. All coats whether heavy or light would be in one group. An example of a group that could be broken apart would be shirts. It might be advantageous to have separate groups for dress shirts, casual shirts, and sweater shirts.

The final step is Prioritize. Which items in your closet are the most important? These items should be in the most prominent position and plain view. Items that are only used on occasion should be positioned towards the back of the closet.

Maeda believes these laws can be used many ways. One such item he touts as using these principles is the iPod. In the image above, you can see the evolution of the controls. Small changes in the organization created a big difference in the design. On the 2003 version, adding the four buttons over the wheel control made this iPod look more complicated to use than the 2001 version. On the 2004 version, you can see that all the controls were integrated into one main control for the whole device. By doing so, the designers made the 2004  iPod much more simple to control.

As designers, we need to learn how we can take Maeda’s laws and create simple design while giving the end user all the elements that are important to their use of the product.

How should we think about these principles when designing for the web?

To find out, I spoke to Andres Zapata, our resident user experience guru. Andres heeds this warning, “remember folks, SLIP alone won’t do it. Also know your user, know your context, and know your need. With good understanding of your audience, context and need, you can almost effortlessly sort, label, integrate and prioritize. Anything else is anyone’s guess. Designing in a vacuum yields drafty results.”

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