A balloon seems to be a very simple object on the outside. You might think it's a pretty simple process to make one, right? Not so much. Check the process out below:
Take one step out of that process, say going through the brushes, and you'd end up with a pretty deformed balloon. Goes to show you that you can't strip a complex process to get end results.
Twitter is a great example, which illustrates this very point. They are rolling out a new version that's faster and simpler to use. Remember the word that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo used? Consistency. Twitter wanted to make everything consistent and simple across all devices.
A simple process won't necessarily get you a simple product
That simple interface didn't spring up overnight. There was a process. The new design comes 14 months after Twitter's previous redesign tanked. Can you imagine having gone through all that effort to redesign an interface only to have to go back and throw everything out? That's what Twitter had to do — ditch all its previous interfaces and redesign everything from scratch.
Think about how Steve Jobs would approach it:
When you start looking at a problem, and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too simplified and they don't work.
Which brings us back to our process as designers, thinking about what we have to do to get simple interfaces. It's not possible to get from A to B without going through a series of steps. It takes a lot of iterations, wireframes and work to hammer out a product even if it appears to be as simple as a balloon. A simple process won't necessarily get you a simple product.