Simplicity
Simple is Best
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The 14th century philosopher William of Ockham is attributed with introducing a very important philosophical concept. "Don't multiply entities beyond necessity." In other words the simplest answer is usually the best and most accurate. This idea is often called "Ockham's Razor" because it can be used to cut through many different bogus arguments that are built on fantastically complex premises. We took a similar approach when designing ZooFoo. As we become increasingly surrounded by technology in our day to day lives efficiency becomes a bigger and bigger issue. There are so many developers in the world in need of employment that companies are constantly developing new and more complex features to include with their products. It is easy for a product to have more features than can be realistically utilized by a user and the nightmare of feature creep quickly sets in. Feature creep is the relatively new idea that features on a technology product can steadily grow to a level of complexity where the actual technology becomes lost or unusable. This can happen on any level from a TV remote with such a large amount of buttons that it becomes challenging to even turn the television on to a website designed with such cunning and complexity that it becomes nearly impossible to access the actual content of the website. Compare the usability of the homepages of Google and AOL. Google presents a minimum of options to choose from and the site is significantly more usable as a result. By limiting the number of useless or meaningless functions ZooFoo makes it extremely simple for you to load, manage and share your photographs. Keeping our galleries simple and clean keeps your images looking their best. We never put extraneous links or confusing features in our album views and of course there are no ads to be found anywhere on ZooFoo. Members of ZooFoo use our site because they want to share photographs and we have designed the site with that task in mind. We want you to be able to spend as little time as possible figuring out how to use ZooFoo and as much time as you want posting, sharing and viewing photos! By limiting the extraneous features available on ZooFoo we are actually giving the user more power and more control. Managing hundreds of useless and tedious attributes is time consuming and frustrating. We eliminated many of these features in order to give users core control over their photo collections. We let you control what you need and keep the rest simple. William of Ockham would be proud. |