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Don’t oversimplify designs: how to work around complexity with Tesler’s law
Oversimplifying design results in unhappy Engineers and confused users
I got my first taste of Tesler’s Law when my designs were rejected for being “Too Simple.”
As a Designer, it sounds weird to hear that. We often aim for designs that are “Simple, intuitive, and easy to use.” Yet not only can you oversimplify a design: but doing so can harm the user experience and shove complexity onto other people.
Over-simplifying designs often harms the user experience
To explain Tesler’s Law, consider a complex subject like your taxes. Imagine if a tax software just asked for your name, social security number, and Employee ID Number.
It chugged along for a few minutes and then said, “Taxes are all done, here’s your refund, would you like to file and finish?”
More than a few of you might hesitate, wanting to manually go over the details or see what the software did. This is because we associate a set level of complexity with the process.
By simplifying the design, we would not only cause back-end developers grief (figuring out how to build such a system): users would not find it that useful.
