The Complexity Paradox

The complexity paradox described by Bruce Tognazzini confirms my belief that the world will continue to need more and more interaction designers.

Given that people will continue to want the same level of complexity in their lives, given that we will continue to reduce the proportion of complexity of any given function that we expose to the user, we may expect that the difficulty and complexity of our own tasks, be they at the application or OS level, will only increase over time. That has certainly been the case so far--we've gone from simple memo writers and sketchpads to document processors and PhotoShop. And we may assume that's only the beginning.