Complexity does not belong in the UI

March 12th, 2010 | 4 Comments »

From “Engineer Thinking” by Matt Legend Gemmell:

If you’ve exposed underling complexity or unnecessary choice in your software because you see those things as inevitable, it’s because your job isn’t finished. If you’re going to write GUI software for other people to use, do it properly, and treat those people like human beings instead of software engineers. If you want to expose complexity to the user and wash your hands of it, write command-line tools – or utilities that are used exclusively by other machine processes.

You can’t have it both ways. Writing GUI software is for people who strive for excellence not only in the “software” part but in the “GUI” part too.

4 Comments on “Complexity does not belong in the UI”

  1. 1 Gerrit Grunwald said at 12:29 pm on March 12th, 2010:

    Sooooo true…!!!
    I made a printout of this post and pinned it on the wall at my office.

  2. 2 Adam Armistead said at 6:57 pm on March 12th, 2010:

    HA! great idea, and I totally agree.

  3. 3 Sebastian said at 1:51 pm on March 13th, 2010:

    Well, I read this with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is true that user interfaces often would profit from a more respectful perspective to the user. On the other hand, without assumptions that may fail for some people or cases, complex tasks often cannot be transformed into simple user interfaces (I would even claim that this works at most half of the time).
    It is my impression that good user interfaces will try to make the users tasks as easy as possible, but not easier. Further on, it is my firm belief that users executing complex tasks will also appreciate reasonably designed GUIs and do not necessarily resort to command line tools.

    Best,
    S.

  4. 4 Mika said at 12:08 am on March 25th, 2010:

    Interesting one ;)
    Indeed, it’s always hard to sum up this kind of process in one quotation. I also tend to like fundamentals such as “know your users”, “make them efficient”…