Miles and Miles of Chaotic Complexity

February 15th, 2012

Rian van der Merwe:

And the decisions that Clear made are as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen. I can picture the endless, difficult meetings and arguments that must have happened to decide what features to include in the app. Should we have Projects and Contexts? No. How about Due Dates and Filters? Nope. Well, why not!? Because Clear is a prioritized list of tasks that is fast and easy to edit. That’s it. Nothing less, nothing more.

I love Clear because it makes adding new tasks as quick as possible. So quick, it’s close to the simplicity of making a list on paper. That makes it perfect for situations where you need to quickly get a bunch of items down for future reference, and that’s what I’m expecting to use it for.

It’s difficult to appreciate just how hard it is to get to that point during the design process. When a design decision feels obvious, it’s a good indication the designer spent many, many hours trying to figure out the best way, going through a bunch of revisions and throwing them out.

My main issue—which Phill Ryu says they recognize—is items are limited to 30 characters. That’s not enough for all items, even when condensing the item. But once that’s addressed, it’s going to be a fantastic way to make lists.