Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity

I’m not quite sure how I came to cross paths with the thoughts of Larry Tesler lately, except to say that in the cacaphony of our wired lives, the Spartan designer deserves to be heard, understood and followed.  I especially like the economic parallel which hides beneath it - how we trade, value, exchange and often disregard the scarcest resource (and currency) of all: time.

Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity states that:

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

In an interview, Tesler further enumerates on his law:

If a million users each waste a minute a day dealing with complexity that an engineer could have eliminated in a week by making the software a little more complex, you are penalizing the user to make the engineer’s job easier.

Whose time is more important to the success of your business? For mass market software, unless you have a sustainable monopoly position, the customer’s time has to be more important to you than your own.

Whether you fancy yourself as a experience designer, an insurance salesman, a roadie, an entrepreneur, or just an everyday human trying not to suck: there is a priceless lesson here for life and business.

[via ProgrammersParadox]

Judicial Activism

“At this point, perhaps we should all accept that the best definition of a ‘judicial activist’ is a judge who decides a case in a way you don’t like.”

— Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI)  [via squashed]

Not quite, Russ.  To downplay the serious issue of judicial activism in this fashion is an ignorant and shocking pronouncement that the Senate cares so little for their constitutional powers that they are inclined to pass them off to the bench.  No doubt a more ‘efficient’ way to get things done — but that doesn’t make for much of a republic.

My Life in the Clouds

Okay, I’ve finally had enough — after an unexpected and completely dibilitating hard drive crash (aren’t they all?) this weekend, I have, like all victims overcoming tragedy, decided to pickup the pieces and move on.  I am therefore officially making it my goal for 2009 to shift more than two-thirds of my digital existence to the greener pastures of “The Cloud”.

• Goodbye Microsoft Office, hello Google Docs
• Goodbye Quicken, hello Mint
• Goodbye bookmarks, hello Delicious [again]
• Goodbye folders, hello Flickr [exclusively]
• Goodbye iTunes… oh wait :(

IT fanboys may scoff at how quickly I shake off my longheld ties to physical disks and pricey programs, which they will claim to be “more secure”… to which I say:

Anyone willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. — Benjamin Franklin

Freedom, in this case, is our inalienable right to have our information (and media) at any time, in any place, and displayed on any acceptable device with complete integrity and usefulness; to own this information despite that we do not physically possess it; and to decide one day, on a whim just as impetuous as this one, to move our lives and information from one cloud to another.

“We the people” need a Thomas Payne for the Information Age.