summarizes the information space in which users must travel in order to complete their tasks.

Like any design process, the information-architecture work is iterative. We’ll draw a representation and ask users and domain experts for feedback. Comments like “no, these two things aren’t related,” “you forgot X,” and “the relationship should be stronger over here” are all clues that we’re making progress toward a sensible organization. It’s hard work, and it often requires immersion in a complex domain in order to understand the details and create structure. The individual features from the original design will be reordered, regrouped, and restructured to form a more usable, comprehensible product.

That’s conservation of complexity in action—not just reducing the number of features, but also reducing unnecessary complexity. The complexity has to go somewhere: The designers shoulder the burden of understanding and untangling it, making sense of it, and constructing a system that is aligned with users’ understanding of the domain. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

convoluted and intricate problems in order to make them understandable and manageable. Architect Christopher Alexander influenced a swath of designers and computer scientists with his work on design patterns and incremental improvement. He points out that “there is a deep and important underlying structural correspondence between the pattern of a problem and the process of designing a physical form which answers that problem [ 4].” He goes on to argue that the “number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place are enormous [ 4],” but that documenting the pattern of a problem is inextricably linked to developing a design solution.

The inherent complexity has to go somewhere, and it’s the burden of designers to take on the complexity on behalf of users. Making sense of the intricate interrelationships between features and reorganizing them so they’re rational is a critical task.

[ 4] Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964

Complexity in the World Imagine that there’s a certain amount of complexity inherent in any task. Worse, the complexity is increasing as we use a bit of technology to bootstrap ourselves to a higher tier. Once a technology provides something that users didn’t have before, we begin to extend that functionality as a means of continual improvement. First, we were satisfied to even have automobiles at all. Then we could worry

about fuel economy, safety, and comfort. Eventually, we can tackle social and environmental concerns. As this inherent complexity increases, where does it reside? In the worst case, the burden will all be on the user, as the consumer of the product. This is the classic case of feature creep. There are at least two other more appropriate places where complexity can reside.

First, it’s appropriate for a product to take on much of the burden on the user’s behalf, especially as the product becomes more mature. Initially, we had to learn to pump our brakes if we needed to stop our car on a rain-slicked or snow-covered street. Now antilock brakes contain that complexity by improving on our abilities and allowing us to focus on other parts of the driving task. It’s not that the need (short stopping distances on slippery surfaces) went away, or the complexity was removed (the physics of stopping a vehicle without locking up the wheels). The complexity was conserved—the burden shifted from the driver to the car.

Second, consider the process of design. A lazy approach is simple and straightforward from the designer’s perspective: Design each feature individually, jam all the features in a single box, and call it a product. But now every user has to contend with the difficulty of using the thing. At best, it will be cryptic, confusing, and inconsistent, if not frustrating and unsuccessful as well.

The process of decomposing, understanding and reorganizing the system is a formidable weapon in our battle against complexity—it lets us distill

ABOUT ThE AUThOr David Bishop is the director of the Human Sciences Group at MAYA Design, Inc. He has been an interaction designer at MAYA since 1996 and is particularly interested in the positive effects that come from having the fortitude to resist feature creep and the insistence to focus on features that users truly need. His first love is hands-on information architecture and user interface design work for MAYA’s repertoire of clients; he has been extending that work to include training in human-centered design processes and measurement of organizations’ usability maturity level. Previously, David was a designer of high-end project-man-agement software at Primavera Systems, Inc. He holds a B.S. in applied mathematics and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

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