Why Easy-to-Use Apps Are Complex to Build
This essay first appeared in Gray Matters 🧠, a weekly newsletter I co-write with Mario Chamorro where we discuss Productivity, Tech, the New Normal, and everything in-between. Please consider subscribing if you like this essay.
I personally contend with a lot of complexity in my job as a software developer, mostly thinking about “where” to put it: is it better to spend time now to make the code less complex for future changes, or is it ok to leave it as it and we can deal with the complexity at a later time if needed? It’s a question without a good answer, as it depends on a bunch of externalities you have no control over: will we maintain this feature for years to come? will it require constant tweaks? All this to say that someone at work recently posted about the Law of Conservation of Complexity which states that complexity can only be moved but not eliminated, which poses the question of…
[…] who should be exposed to the complexity. For example, should a software developer add complexity to the software code to make the interaction simpler for the user or should the user deal with a complex interface so that the software code can be simple?
Bruce Togazzini has a bold answer to that question: you shouldn’t think about that, but about what happens when we — software developers — inevitably hide complexity inside the…
