Every software team has had the same conversation.
“We’ll explain it during onboarding.”
It sounds perfectly reasonable. It feels like being helpful. And every time we hear it, we suspect the wrong problem is being solved.
Not because onboarding is bad. Good onboarding introduces value. It shouldn’t have to introduce the interface.
If your product needs a paragraph of text before someone can complete the first task they came to do, the issue usually isn’t the explanation. It’s the design.
One Button
In 2007, Apple shipped a device that could browse the web, play music, take photos, send messages and run applications — and put a single button on the front of it.
Think about the confidence that took. Every competing phone at the time wore its capability on its face: rows of keys, dedicated shortcuts, menus behind menus. Apple took a machine more capable than any of them and made it look like it did almost nothing. The complexity didn’t disappear. It moved from the user’s side of the screen to the builder’s.
That’s the real job of design. Not removing complexity — absorbing it.
The complexity didn’t disappear. It moved from the user’s side of the screen to the builder’s.
The most successful software shares this characteristic: almost nobody remembers learning how to use it. Nobody studied how to search on Google. The first time most people dragged a file into Dropbox, it simply felt like the obvious thing to do.
Somewhere along the way, though, our industry started confusing capability with complication. We’ve lost count of how many admin panels we’ve opened where the first screen feels like the cockpit of a 747 — and somewhere in each of those companies, a feature request became easier to approve than deleting an old feature. Dashboards grew denser. Settings pages multiplied. Instead of asking whether users would understand something instinctively, teams assumed they’d learn it eventually.
And when they didn’t, the patches arrived. Documentation. Then videos. Then walkthroughs. Then interactive product tours.
Without quite realising it, teams had begun designing explanations instead of designing experiences.
Users Forgive Complexity. They Don’t Forgive Effort.
Users are remarkably forgiving of complex problems. They know their accounting software is doing difficult work. They understand that a logistics platform or a medical system carries real challenges beneath the surface.
What they won’t forgive is unnecessary effort. Users don’t mind that the software is complicated. They mind that using it is.
One of the most useful exercises we’ve watched a product team run makes that difference visible. No analytics, no surveys, no AI-generated insights. They simply asked someone who had never seen the product to complete a task — while everyone else stayed silent. No hints. No demonstrations. No rescuing them when they clicked the wrong thing.
The interesting moments weren’t the failures. Most people eventually figure things out. The interesting moments were the pauses.
The second glance at the navigation. The cursor hovering between two buttons. The brief hesitation before clicking “Delete” — not entirely convinced it wouldn’t delete the wrong thing.
Those tiny moments are where products reveal themselves. Every hesitation is evidence that the interface is asking the user to think about the software instead of the problem they came to solve. The best interfaces do the opposite — they let people think about their work, their ideas, their customers, because the software quietly fades into the background.
Invisible Is a Compliment
When people talk about products they love, they rarely praise the navigation or compliment the settings page. They say things like “it just works” or “I never have to think about it.”
Those aren’t throwaway comments. They’re among the highest compliments software can receive: the product became so intuitive that people stopped noticing it altogether.
Achieving that is one of the hardest jobs in product design. Adding another option is easy — another checkbox, another modal, another advanced setting can be built in an afternoon. Deciding those things shouldn’t exist at all is much harder. Simplicity demands confidence, because it requires saying no far more often than saying yes.
Every feature carries a cost that extends well beyond development time.
It competes for attention. It makes the interface fractionally more intimidating. It asks every future user to process one more decision before reaching the thing they came to do.
Those costs rarely appear on a roadmap. Users pay them every single day.
Every feature is another decision your users have to make.
The Better Question
Documentation, guides and API references all have their place — once someone wants to go deeper. But the question product teams should ask more often isn’t “how do we explain this?”
It’s “why does this need explaining?”
Software is often judged by the number of features it contains. Users judge it by something far simpler: whether they had to stop and think.
The best products earn trust not because they’re clever, but because they quietly remove decisions. And if people leave your product remembering the work they accomplished rather than the interface they used, you’ve built something worth keeping.
How We Think About Software
This principle shapes almost everything we build at Plus±.
Whether we’re designing a landing page, rebuilding a SaaS dashboard or creating an internal platform, we spend far more time removing decisions than adding features. Every button has to justify its existence. Every screen should feel quieter than the one before it.
We don’t believe the best products are the ones with the most features. We believe they’re the ones that feel obvious from the very first interaction. That usually means challenging assumptions, simplifying workflows and removing layers that have accumulated over time—not adding another tooltip to explain them.
It’s slower work. It often means saying no more than yes. But when people can focus on their business instead of figuring out your interface, the software has done its job.
If you’re building a product that feels more complicated than it should—or one that’s gradually becoming harder to use with every release—we’d love to help.
Curious how we approach product design? Explore our process, see how we work, or get in touch to discuss your next project.