There is a bell curve in the judgement of simple design that goes something like this:
It applies to all types of industries and sectors – art, architecture, industrial design, advertising, software, websites... etc. Anywhere people assume design is about preference and opinion (style vs. substance).
People on top of the curve (😡 #2) mistake simplicity for laziness, egoism, or worse – incompetence.
Maybe you've heard or read something along these lines when talking about something that was intentionally designed to be simple:
At the risk of sounding trite – There is no clearer example of this phenomenon than people's passion surrounding Apple's software (& hardware) design vs. the alternatives like Microsoft, Samsung, Windows, Linux, Android, etc. Love Apple or hate them – the result is polarizing to say the least.
Without an understanding of or appreciation for what design is and is not, people mistake first impressions with lasting experience. It's an easy mistake to make since most people are not designers. First impressions are a powerful motivator in decision making and many people mistake the objective of design to be just that. When the problem space of a complex challenge has been explored, iterated on, and refined – the design fades away into the background leaving you with the solution in its place.
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible...”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
A problem I have faced my entire career, especially when working with clients that are engineers and/or programmers – since they do not posses a deep understanding of design principles, the only metric they have to go on is first impressions. This presents it's own challenge, because if you did a decent job at solving the problem – it will seem as though that is the way it should have always been. Only when it doesn't work as expected or the design is sticking out will the result be noticed – good or bad. The simpler, more refined the resulting solution, the more “obvious” your solution seems, the less likely they will understand the effort.
Good design takes on extra responsibility (read: burden) of proactively solving people's problems before realize they have them. This is the opposite of complicated software that has a million buttons, options, or settings. The designer has taken the responsibility of solving the problem instead of passing it onto someone else – the user.
A design can become so good that it becomes ubiquitous – “present, appearing, or found everywhere.” When something becomes so intuitive that it becomes the norm and people become accustomed to it, it no longer counts as effort to people who are looking at design as novelty. Since the solution now seems obvious to them, they can only conclude that it took no work to arrive at the solution (Simple = lazy).
Simplicity polarizes – A great measure of success is where on the curve it hits. If nobody feels passionate about your work, either love or hate, you aren't pushing hard enough into the problem space. At the very least people tolerate it, or worse – it's irrelevant.