Flexibility, Complexity, and Holistic Design

In the modern world we expect technology to be simple and intuitive to use. Frequently this expectation lives beyond conscious experience. For example when visiting a website, the menu should be in the top left, it should have a 3-line “hamburger” icon, and it should list names of subpages with relevant information. When this is not the case we may be quick to frustration. Who designed this? Why is it so hard to find anything? In the case of a restaurant’s website, this can be an egregious mistake causing lost business. There is very little important information for a restaurant to share online. What food do you serve, where are you located, when are you open, and how do I make a reservation? None of this should require more than two clicks to find.

The challenge of intuitive design scales indefinitely depending on what an application is intended to do. Take M-Files for example, https://www.m-files.com/about/

“M-Files delivers a context-first document management platform that connects documents to the work they support, transforming documents from isolated files into a connected, governed document management system of work.” 

This all sounds great, but if you open M-Files, what would you expect to see? It’s unclear because of the broad range of things M-Files is capable of doing. This is because M-Files is not a bespoke solution. The intention is for it to be customized toward nearly any use case.

This is the flexibility/complexity tradeoff in action. The more things your application can do (i.e. the more flexible it is), the more complex it becomes to use. This is a very simple idea, but it has broad implications. The point of menus e.g. in the Microsoft Office suite is to hide complexity. When you open Microsoft Word the most important thing you see is a blank white page on which you can start typing. This is the key use case, but at the top of the screen is a heap of menus in which all of Word’s complexity lives because over the years it has continuously become more and more flexible. When Microsoft removes features from Word there are sure to be angry users due to its extremely broad user base. Thus the density of their menus have and are destined to continue to increase indefinitely. I suspect that if Microsoft could go back in time they would have made many different design decisions with Word, but I digress.

While Word is an especially extreme example, this is a crucial consideration when designing anything. Who will be using this and for how long? Before adding a feature, consider how difficult it might be to maintain or if there’s a simpler way to accomplish it. Would a significant number of people actually care about this feature? Solutions require ongoing support as new requirements arise and the tech stack around them evolves. It is often the case that less is more.

This is where holistic design comes in. The more a designer knows about their users and what they are solving for them, the better designed that solution is. Inevitably there are gaps between requirements and implementation details. Good design is knowing how to fill these gaps. Sometimes that involves numerous documents and meetings to review various details, but in other cases that groundwork has already been laid through past interactions. At TEAM IM we have customers that we’ve worked with for over five years. That experience manifests into holistically designed solutions that strike the proper balance between complexity and flexibility. This keeps everyone happy as solutions are continuously used, supported, and enhanced.