Full Blog: Living With Complexity

Reference Information

   Title: Living With Complexity

   Author: Donald A. Norman

   Editors: The MIT Press (2010) 

Summary

Norman begins by talking about the idea of things being complex and things being complicated. Things being complex refers to the state of the world, the tasks we do and the tools we use. Things being complicated refers to the psychological state of a person attempting to understand, use or interact with something in the world.

He then talks about how complicated systems occur as a result of poor design and different ways of coping with complexity. There are several examples however of when we like complexity as it seems to be appropriate. One of the ways that he measures complexity is by the time it takes to learn and master a task.

Norman talks about the conceptual model, the underlying belief a person holds about how something works. The conceptual model helps to simplex complexity in systems. He goes on to talk about "featuritis", adding more and more features to a product thereby increasing its complexity. Norman prefers an intermediate level of complexity as simpler looking products do not always result in simpler to use.

Donald Norman talks about how things get increasingly complicated when the number of items increases. Passwords for example, are an instance of this. He then goes on to talk about how we cope with information by putting it in the world. People will sometimes put passwords under their monitor. 

"Scaling" is a problem that works well sometimes but fails as the number grows. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need signs and too much information makes things complicated. Forcing functions on items provides many benefits.

Social signifiers are indicators that an environment allows people to navigate in complex environment. These things are referred to as perceived affordances. He talks about the importance of signifiers as they provide clues to the world and how people should act.

Discussion
I thought Norman gave a lot of really good examples in this book. I particularly liked the chapter about task mastering. 10,000 is a lot of time to become an expert at a field. The part about increasingly complexity with increasing number of items hit home. I have far too many passwords.