The magic button. Right up until the moment she presses it and it does something different to what she expects, because it doesn’t do the same as it did last time she pressed it like that.

I think this is a common flaw of user interface designs these days: everyone seems to want fewer buttons, so they overload each button to do more things. This just decreases the predictability of what the button will do, which is clearly a bad thing. Take mobile phones as an example: there are certain brands of phone that have a number pad and one big button that does everything: dial, hang up, answer, menu.

This is great until you try to bring up the menu while you’re talking to someone.

Your entire post, up until this point, has proffered that users prefer simplicity and robustness. Not that users prefer complexity. You are as confusing as Dvorak is inaccurate.

AND, against one of your axioms, in your post you misspelled complexity as “compelxity.”

Come on John, practice what you preach!

In my experience, yes. To be more clear, a geek (e.g., programmer) is likely to enjoy complexity, particularly technical complexity, more than my grandmother. Obviously there are excellent exceptions, such as the satisfaction associated with elegant code, which might be very simple. In any event, I’ll stand by by opinion, which is all that it is. There are plenty of ways to demonstrate that I wrong. I can live with that.

Techies don’t mind complexity, one of the benefits is it keeps out the riff-raff the other is demonstrating how smart they are. People desire to feel smart, and indespensible, that’s why work evironments will test differently from home environments. And marketing managers can point to tests where consumers choose feature lists on boxes, even though they also know returns can be much higher later.

People are in ond mode when choosing and use a different cognitive model when using. Until designers understand this, you’ll get this seeming paradox time and time again. There are ways to design for this to produce adequate sales and lower returns.

Dvorak wrote that people “choose” complexity and that’s true. Of course, they aren’t looking for the package that says “Now more complex!”, but they are buying the product that has more features (there was just a study on this). Generally, more features means more complexity.

It’s also true that they want simplicity, but generally not over a perceived infererior product.

The other thing to keep in mind is that consumers don’t make rational decisions (Seth Godin just blogged about this). They are swayed by marketers and make emotionally-based decisions. And, most of the time, marketing is convincing people that more is better (the iPod is the obvious counter-example).