Origins
While working for Xerox PARC in the mid-1980s, Larry Tesler realized that the way users
interact with applications was just as important as the application itself. The book Designing for Interaction
by Dan Saffer, includes an interview with Larry Tesler that describes the law of conservation of complexity.
The interview is popular among user experience and interaction designers. Larry Tesler argues that, in most
cases, an engineer should spend an extra week reducing the complexity of an application versus making millions
of users spend an extra minute using the program because of the extra complexity However, Bruce Tognazzini
proposes that people resist reductions to the amount of complexity in their lives. Thus, when an application
is simplified, users begin attempting more complex tasks.
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