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Laws of UX
book

Laws of UX

by Jon Yablonski
April 2020
Beginner
152 pages
3h 15m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Audiobook available
Content preview from Laws of UX

Chapter 9. Tesler’s Law

Tesler’s law, also known as the law of conservation of complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced.

Overview

Who should bear the burden of complexity within an application or a process—the user, or the designers and developers? This is a fundamental question when considering the design of user interfaces and, more broadly, how humans interact with technology. A key objective for designers is to reduce complexity for the people that use the products and services we help to build, yet there is some inherent complexity in every process. Inevitably we reach a point at which complexity cannot be reduced any further but only transferred from one place to another. At this point, it finds its way either into the user interface or into the processes and workflows of designers and developers.

Origins

The origins of Tesler’s law can be traced back to the mid-1980s, when Larry Tesler, a computer scientist at Xerox PARC, was helping to develop the language of ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492055303Errata Page