Why Life Can’t Be Simpler

A second lesson is that things don’t always need to be incredibly simple for users.

Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else. When a product or service becomes simpler for users, engineers and designers have to work harder. Norman writes, “With technology, simplifications at the level of usage invariably result in added complexity of the underlying mechanism. ”

A third lesson is that products and services are only as good as what happens when they break.

The first lesson from Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity is that how simple something looks is not a reflection of how simple it is to use.

The total complexity of a system is a constant. If you make a user’s interaction with a system simpler, the complexity behind the scenes increases.

If we accept that complexity is a constant, we need to always be mindful of who is bearing the burden of that complexity.