Simplicity creates trust

I've spent more time in funeral homes than most software engineers. I'm second-generation. My family has been in the industry longer than I've been writing code. I also work with state lottery teams navigating App Store rejections that stall products for months.

These seem like different worlds. They're not. Both taught me the same lesson: when stakes are high and trust is fragile, simplicity isn't a design preference. It's a moral obligation.

Funeral homes and the cost of confusion

When a family walks into a funeral home, they are not evaluating your UX. They are grieving. Overwhelmed. Making decisions they'll remember for decades under emotional pressure they didn't choose.

Every digital touchpoint in that environment (the website, the obituary page, the payment portal, the follow-up email) either reduces their burden or adds to it. There is no neutral.

A confusing website in a funeral context doesn't just lose a click. It signals: this organization doesn't have its act together when you need them most. That signal transfers to everything else: the service, the staff, the facility. Digital and physical trust collapse together.

This is why I push back hard when teams want to add features to "modernize" a funeral home's digital presence without first fixing the three things families actually need: clear information, easy contact, and a path that doesn't require a tutorial.

Lotteries and institutional credibility

State lottery apps operate under a different kind of pressure. They're government-adjacent products that must feel trustworthy enough for someone to link their money, their identity, and their daily habits.

When I've helped teams in North Carolina and DC get past extended App Store rejections, the technical fixes mattered, but the underlying issue was often trust communication. Apple wasn't just evaluating code. They were evaluating whether this product looked like something a reasonable person would install and use.

Complex onboarding flows, cluttered interfaces, and unclear data practices don't just fail review. They fail the citizen. I wrote more about this in What lotteries taught me about App Store psychology.

Simplicity as respect

I think of simplicity as respect for attention.

Every person who opens your app is giving you something finite: their focus, their patience, their willingness to believe you know what you're doing. Complexity spends that currency fast. Simplicity preserves it.

This doesn't mean dumbing things down. It means removing everything that doesn't serve the person in front of you, including the things your team finds intellectually interesting but your user will never notice.

Three practical signals

When I evaluate whether a product earns trust through simplicity, I look for:

• First screen clarity. Can someone understand what this is and what to do next in five seconds? Not five minutes. Five seconds.
• Error humanity. When something breaks, does the message help or blame? Trust dies in error states.
• Exit dignity. Can someone leave, pause, or get help without feeling trapped? Forced flows signal desperation.

These aren't design trends. They're behavioral signals. People read them unconsciously and decide (in seconds) whether to trust you with the next tap.

What I'm still working on

I don't always build simple products on the first try. My first apps were feature-heavy because I was excited to prove I could build. It took years (and watching real people struggle with things I'd made) to understand that restraint is a skill, not a limitation.

I'm still learning it. Every product I touch now gets the same question: what can we remove without losing the behavior we're trying to create?

Simplicity creates trust. Complexity spends it.