Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity

The law states that: “Every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity.” The only question is who will have to deal with it.

According to Larry Tesler , A commercial software is written once and used millions of times. 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  than the user is being penalized for making the engineer’s job easy. He developed this principle while he was working for the apple Mac in mid - 1980’s. The law became very popular and is quite practical. For example : The windows OS takes comparatively much longer time in booting as compared to Mac OS. If the software engineers of window’s could spent more time in fixing the matter than probably many windows users could save several  hours at the end of the year.

Larry’s law points towards designing for users. He calls it the “Method design” and states that the developer should place himself in the user’s shoes. Only then he will be able to develop a better user and interface design. Moreover each type of user’s have their own necessities. Take for example the Adobe Photoshop is used differently by animators, photo-editors, advertisers, graphic-designers, web-designers or school students respectively. Even the Adobe flash software is used by web-developers, designers, animators etc. These softwares despite of being so massive maintain their easy user ability and   interface designs.  Again the softwares designed for engineering or mathematical purposes have their interface objectives much different compared to designing softwares.

In one of the interview Larry even explained about the choice of words which should be shorter and easy to remember and understand. I can easily remember the short cut ‘Ctrl S’ to save a document since my 2^nd grade, but instead if it were given the shortcut ‘Ctrl Q’ I would have probably messed up.

The law, thus gives importance to user’s time and easy access. Larry strongly recommends for proper ‘usability testing’ of the software before it is published.  The money for “usability testing” should not be saved at the cost of users time.

 I do would like to know more about Larry and his work. It is very interesting, true and practical. He seems to have a very popular name amongst the User Experience and the Interaction Design Professionals. But unfortunately there is only little information available about him on the internet.