Compressed Complexity

There is a lot of advice out there stating that every product should be as simple as possible. Less clicks, less decisions. There’s even a prominent story about having too many jams to choose from and the overwhelming sadness that can cause.

Like most high level advice, this idea started form a good place. Removing cognitive overhead is worth doing. Where this advice starts to fall apart is when it gets applied as a fix-all to all issues. Not enough sign ups? Remove clicks. Users churning, too many buttons. Simple however, doesn’t mean less, it means clear.

When we mistakenly assume less is simpler we end up condensing complexity rather than removing it. On the surface, these changes often look a lot simpler. There’s more white space in the UI, less pages to look at and far fewer steps to complete.

Underneath that simplicity users become lost. What was once three simple steps is now one. Often with a new name that doesn’t mean much to anyone who wasn’t in the room during the naming ceremony.

At work, in my role leading our product team, I have a rule of thumb which is “less magic”. If we are going to simplify something it cannot be at the cost of introducing more hidden or compressed complexity. That complexity is hard to understand and can often come across as ‘just one of those things the product does’ which I somewhat fondly call magic.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

There are lots of ways to combat ‘magic’ in product design. First, realising that the desire to make things easier for users is a good thing to aim for. What we need to do is find ways to guide and teach the user how the product does what it does. When we do that well, the mysticism of the functions fade away and the system goes from magical to well understood.

One way I’ve seen this work well is to gradually simplify as users become familiar with the product. In the early days, things are stepped out and slow. You draw attention to features and lay things out clearly. As users repeat these workflows more and more you can begin to introduce shortcuts. Users know the steps being skipped so they are comfortable with the compression.

“Rather than editing items one by one, here’s bulk editing.“

“You seem to be doing this a lot, here’s how templates work.”

Users come on a journey without magic and opt into compression when they are ready. You’ll want to keep these options in your product for the long term. You can’t just launch the more compressed version once and hope that any new user picks things up along the way.

One important thing to keep in mind when doing this is that you, as the builder of the product, probably run through these experiences an order of magnitude more often than any user. What feels familiar to you might feel alien to someone doing it for the first time. The extra steps and explanation might feel obvious to you but provide the necessary context for someone seeing things for the first time.

This same consideration needs to be made when thinking about existing, long term users and brand new ones. The flows are often familiar to users that have seen the app change and grow but to someone new all the new small features you’ve launched can be overwhelming.