Explaining the Law of Conservation of Complexity - Humanist

Every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it.

Working in both user experience and product management, we see patterns form around our work and interactions with others. One such pattern is that simplifying a system for users often means moving the complexity to another part of the system. When removing user complexity, that complexity will not be removed from the system but will move from users to the development team. As a product manager, this becomes crystal clear when you are standing between a user experience designer and an engineer, both looking to you to decide if moving complexity from the user to the system is worth a week or mo

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• Cyrus Chuang

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