Getting Jiggy With Complexity (ie. when it’s OK to be overwhelmed by complexity)

The beautiful devices we hold in our hands to call someone went through this squiggly design process. Those intuitive apps we use on a daily basis went through this. The simple box we use to access the rest of the Web went through it.

In fact, not only did this blog post go through this squiggle of complexity but I’d suggest we are somewhere in the middle of it as an industry too. Pundits and lawyers alike are forming insights and patterns on a daily basis, but also with the underlying panic of uncertainty as to what it will all look like once that clarity is achieved.

Know that to get to the simple, we have to get through the squiggle of complexity first.

That squiggle represents the place where we come up with the million-and-one things we want the system to do; it’s the place where we feel unbound with our ideas and creative concepts. But then project and technical constraints, business priorities, and real user needs force us (or we get beaten over the head with the simplicity stick) to choose and to simplify.

Too many projects call “Closing Time” too early. Getting all the features you want from your search solution or SharePoint project is only about two-thirds of the way through that squiggle. You have to push on through by “subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful“. Less truly is more.

Elegant and simple designs almost always have a good set of design principles that help guide teams through the complexity part of a process. Otherwise design decisions can feel arbitrary and based on who-shouts-loudest.

So embrace the process and get jiggy with that squiggle. Dealing with the complexity early on saves your lawyers from having to deal with it after launch. And that’s got to be a good thing.