Full Blog: Living With Complexity

Reference  Information

Title: Living With Complexity

Author: Donald Norman

Publisher: 2010 Basic Books

Summary
We only read part of this book, but from what we did read, it discussed complexity. This includes what causes complexity, how people cope with it, and how design should take it into account.

Complexity naturally exists in the world, and good design tames it by managing it and making it less complicated. The keys to coping with complexity include the design of the thing itself that determines understandability and our own set of abilities and skills. Complex things are often enjoyable and sought out, including things such as music that require much study or practice.

People claim to want things to be simpler, but then ask for more features. Because of this, eliminating buttons to increase simplicity is not always the answer. There is a trade-off with design: the easier something is for the user to use, the harder it is for the designer to design. Simplicity is not the goal - understandability is, and conceptual models play a large role in understanding.

Even simple things can still be confusing, since each thing has its own, unique rules of operation. To help deal with this, the author suggests putting information in the world to get it out of the mind. This includes using reminders such as sticky notes and signs (these can be just as confusing, though). Complexity can be reduced by using forcing functions to constrain the amount of possible actions.

People generally manage well in new situations due to cues provided by the actions of others (social signifiers). The exact interpretation of each signifier depends on other, related knowledge, and can be ambiguous and misleading. Cultural complexity can affect the interpretation of social signifiers, and things such as culture clash can occur. Good design provides signifiers to signal the appropriate use of the device.

An interesting graphical interpretation of complexity/simplicity as related to features.
Source: blog.twinloops.com

Discussion
I thought this book made some very interesting points. Most of the time when someone thinks about complexity, the solution seems to be to eliminate features and options and make only a few things possible. But Norman argued (even against his earlier self from previous books) that this is not the case. Complexity can be desired if it is understandable; it is only undesirably if it is too confusing. I particularly liked being able to compare this book to the other Norman books that we have read, since this seems to be the most recent. Many of the viewpoints that he presented in earlier books (such as feature creep) were rescinded upon, and he even admitted to many of them. The main thing that I disliked about this book was the lack of serifs in the font. Personally, that seems like it is a case of bad design due to trying to simplify the book, when it really just made it more confusing to read. Despite that, though, I believe that many of the points raised in this book would be helpful to design of future systems. Especially the fact that simplicity is not necessarily good, and that many features can be included as long as they are understandable.