Complexity talks

Complexity describes how many parts, states and relationships a product or system has, and how hard it is to understand. Some complexity is unavoidable because the task itself is complex; some is introduced by poor design.

For UX and product designers, the goal is rarely to remove all complexity but to manage it: to make complex things understandable, structured and learnable so people can work with them confidently. That means telling necessary complexity apart from needless complication.

The two talks here approach the subject from different angles. Don Norman’s Living with Complexity (TED Talks, 2014) deals with complexity in the things we design and use, and Dave Snowden’s Making Sense of Complexity looks at how to understand complex situations. Patterns such as progressive disclosure and good defaults in the UI-Patterns.com library are common ways of keeping complexity manageable.