Universal Principles of UX

46

Some complexity cannot be reduced.

I’m writing this book on a 2020 MacBook Air. It’s the thinnest and lightest computer I’ve ever had and quite possibly the most beautiful one as well. But I curse it on an almost daily basis. There’s not a single USB, HDMI, or SD card input, which means that every time I need to connect to a screen, move files, or access my external hard drive, I need to first connect to a very expensive dongle that was not included with the laptop. By making the product thinner, lighter, and simpler, Apple has made my life more complicated.

This is in direct violation of Tesler’s law, which argues that for any system, there is a certain level of complexity that cannot be reduced. The law was coined by computer scientist ...