Last week I flew to London for the UX London conference at The Great Cumberland Hotel. It was an inspiring 3-day conference that consisted of a few well-known guest speakers and a few days of intensive workshops.

While I learned a lot from each speaker, I think the one that had the most meaningful impact on me was Don Norman’s talk titled “In Favor of Complexity”. While this spans many fields, on the web we see designers today trying to make things as simple as possible which may not always be the right solution. Norman argues that because life and people are complex, the tools we use or the things we interact with must (but not always) be complex as well. He gave a few examples that covered devices like an Italian espresso machine to Al Gore’s messy desk. In the desk example, just because I can’t go into Mr. Gore’s office and understand where things are doesn’t mean it isn’t an efficient/productive workspace environment for him. My take away from Don’s talk is that intuitive designs come are based on understanding and providing tools to afford more complex inputs might not be such a bad idea.