The Complexity Curve: How to Design for Simplicity
Details: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP13657
There are three perspectives of complexity.
Concerned with how it looks. This means:
Sufficient negative space.
Appropriate hierarchy to help people extract the right information.
We're concerned with how things work. Functionality, context and flow. This means:
Interactivity - how does it work?
Structure - how are things organized and connected?
Flow - what does it take to accomplish your goal?
People think about complexity differently than we do.
Clutter gets in the way, but so does irrelevance. They want what they need to be right in front of them, despite the clutter that may result.
Difficult tasks are complex by nature.
Confusion leads to people calling things complex. If you can't figure out what it does, you'll think it's complex.
Chaos - We're crappy at predicting weather because it's choatic. Things change from day to day and are not predictable. But it's not random. It's structured and deterministic, but you can't predict it. It's self-organizing, has an emergent structure, and sensitive to perturbation.
Systems are complex by nature. "Complex systems that appear to have an impossibly large number of variables can actually be described and understood with remarkebly few variables."
What results in complexity:
Disregard for design. Poorly designed sites are a source of pain.
Expectations vs. reality. We often want people to use something the way we use it.
Mental model mismatch. Results in disruption in flow.
Copying patterns. When we copy solutions from other places, it may not solve the problem that we're faced with.
Anti-patterns. Commonly recurring solutions that are not optimized. They may work great in one place, but not another.
Dark patterns. They lead you to do things you would not otherwise do.
New and different. Too different from the norm. People don't like change.
Scope creep. Forgotten features, absent stakeholders who provide their feedback too late, and unforeseen vendor issues. "Executive bungee-jumping."
Constraints and requirements. Technical constraints, legal requirements, business requirements.
High cognitive loads feel difficult. Understanding and memory.
People deal with complexity by:
Developing expertise. Path: Declarative knowledge > Procedural knowledge > Automaticity (Habits)
Novices & Experts. Don't forget that you're the expert, the users are not.
Limitations. Materials, manufacturing, technological capability. "We can't make it fast enough to do that." Fortunately technology evolves.
Not everything should be simple.
Provide clarity. Improve the structure. Refine the flow.
Look for advances in materials and manufacturings. (Inventables.)
We have to have patience in technology.
Forward forces. Needs that push technology forward.
How do people deal with complexity?
A sufficiently motivated person will tolerate a lot of crap.
If it's the only way to get something done, people will tolerate it.
Sometimes we need to teach people.
Transfer of knowledge and skills. We look for instructions and people who can tell us how to do it. We look for analogies.
How do we tackle complexity from a design perspective?
Leverage your ignorance. Before you know what the complexities are, you have awesome ideas. Write them down before you know why you can't do them. When we know we can't do them, go back to the ideas and say "How else can I do this?"
Put people first. Design for motivation. Design for behavior. Design for emotion. Leverage your creativity.
Use mental models. Match conceptual and mental models. Hide the system models. Keep in mind that mental & conceptual models evolve over time.
Focus people. Focus their attention and flow.
Reduce the effort, time it takes to complete a task & the number of errors they may make.
However, simplicity is not just about reduction. Don't confuse subtraction with simplification.
Shift the complexity away from the person.
Feature complete is not experience optimized!
We get to simplicity through iteration.
Incubate - walk away, take a break, come back with fresh eyes.
Cross-pollination - look elsewhere for ideas.
Observation - watch what people are doing.
When we do these things, new solutions for everyday objects emerge.
Critical thinking. A persistent effort to examine any belief, idea, or fact. Think hard about everything we do.
Opportunities to simplify
"Messy & confusing." Irrelevance. Disorganization. Ambiguity.
Indirect action. Abstracted & disconnected the action from the outcome. Increased the cognitive load.
Everything to everyone. Too many variables and too little focus.
Design by consensus. Scope creep.
"Nice to have…" Introduces noise, clutter & excess.
Copying solutions. Misapplied patterns.
Map structure to organziation or technology. Exposed the system model.
Leading with technology. Solving the wrong on non-existent problem.
Accepting assumptions. Not collecting data, absence of critical thinking.
