Monthly Archives: June 2015

So often in my new experiences complexity is the selling point, the starting point, and/or the proof of your value. People (customers) don’t share this vision. People are intelligent but must be set free to construct the level of complexity they are comfortable with, or need.

Complexity isn’t designed but rather rises spontaneously through self-organisation. Start with basic or simple interactions and allow more complex behaviours or patterns to emerge.
From an old project proposal, source is likely from theory of emergence.

No medium has managed to reach the status of genuine artistry without offending some of its audience some of the time. Even under the user-friendly dictates of interface design, you can’t make art without a good measure of alienation.
Steven Johnson, Interface Culture (HarperEdge, 1997)

More choice equals more choice

My current projects all involve dealing with issues of featureitis, software with simple uses, but with a monstrous amount of controls and options. It’s well designed software created by brilliant nice people, but many have fallen into the belief that more UI controls, more options, more visible data, somehow makes software more desirable. This is of course a long held problem, routed not just in software (ala. Microsoft Windows) but in Western Society herself. As far as interface design is concerned, I know from experience, more choice as a feature seldom works, as complexity leads to more complexity, more choice leads to dissatisfaction.

Neil Turner summarises some of Barry Schwartz’s thinking in answering the question:

Is lots of choice a good thing?

You see it turns out whilst people will invariably ask for more choice, lots of choice is not really a good thing for the following reasons:

  • More choice means more options for people to consider, and a greater cognitive workload to do so, as all the different options are weighed up and evaluated.
  • With lots of choice the burden of responsibility is placed on the person making the choice, rather than those drawing up the choices. If a bad choice is made it’s because someone chose the wrong option, not because a poor set of options were made available.
  • More choice means greater expectations, and a greater probably of not meeting those expectations. With so many options available, people will expect there to be one that is exactly what is need, and will no doubt be disappointed when they don’t choose it.
  • More choice means less engagement.Sometimes people would rather not take part, than have to go through a million and one different options. For example, an interesting study showed that for every 10 investment funds that an employer offered for their pension scheme (e.g. 10, 20, 30, 40 different funds, and so on), uptake fell by 2%. Employees were put off participating because they didn’t want to have to select from so many different options.

    • The paradox of choice and why I stopped using Spotify

Ideally, we would focus entirely on those features or controls that users need to accomplish their goals while deleting our through perhaps progressive disclosure keep all the complexity hidden from all but the most advanced user. My experience is that that is far more difficult than it ought to be but its a challenge worth engaging in.

Below is a ted talk where Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

It’s not strategy

Michael Bierut, a respected visual designer, said this about luck during an interview with Adaptive Path founder Peter Merholz:

“It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of ‘strategy’ but of common sense, taste, and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this and create gargantuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security.”

From Mental Models by Indi Young