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]

The United States of Mind

The WSJ highlights some counter-intuitive findings about the geography of personality, based on a study published this month in Perspectives on Psychological Science which mapped personality traits alongside state-by-state crime, health and economic data in order to look beyond the cliché of the ”stressed out New Yorker”. 

Would you believe that North Dakota is the capital of extroverts, or that Washington D.C. the epicenter of openess to new ideas? [What!?]  Turns out neurotic anxiety is not the staple of Wall Street alone — poverty is just as stressful, though both extremes lead to the same result: higher incidence of heart disease and lower life expectancy.

The findings offer many essential sociological and economic questions, but I am stuck on just one for the moment: does the place we call home shape our values, or are we simply drawn to areas (and people) that reflect these values?