How simple is too simple?

 There's no such thing as too good User Experience in design. Let me tell you one thing I learned from making UI for the crowd: that people who make UI confuse 'simple UI' with 'better UI'.

There's a law in UX, Tesler’s Law, which states that complexity can't be reduced; instead, it can only be shifted towards either the system or the user.

Take the classic computer keyboard. If you are an application and want to assign a keybind for a function, would you like to be a series of keys or a single, reserved key?

For most, the reserved key is way more promising, as it requires the least cognitive load and won't get in your way. But if you had gone through the other way, the keyboard only needed fewer keys, way less likely to get people traumatized.

Programs with a steep learning curve take the route for the least cognitive load by creating reserved buttons for each function. Stuff like a blender is intimidating for a new user, but clean for a practicing user.

The most useful piece of software would be one that allows you to customize everything in it, to optimize it more, to control your workflow, to be simple if needed, and should be intuitive - and that is what a computer already is, but the learning curve is simply too steep, which starts at assembly.

But simplification, while being a pain for advanced users, can be life-saving for common people. One thing is that they just don't care, or aren't interested, or simply that they have worse things to worry about. A firefighter shouldn't be required to know how GPS works just to reach a house on fire. 

Continue reading on the abstraction series.

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