Press enter or click to view image in full size
This is by far one of the most interesting quotes I have come across in recent years, and you’ll always find me using it often. Simply put, “eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation” means: avoid ambiguity and adopt clarity. The phrase is also four words longer than it needs to be, which is the entire problem with it, and with most of design.
I have stopped believing that clarity is a virtue you can choose. Clarity is a budget. You spend it on the things the user has to understand, and you protect it ruthlessly from the things they do not.
The real world is much too complex to be dealt with comprehensively.
Design solutions are not scientific solutions. Scientific ones are rational, defined, and limited. Design has to absorb the social, economic, political, and personal aspects of the people it serves, which means a design culture has to be broad in scope and deep in meaning. Being fully rational under those conditions is not possible. The designer’s job is not to eliminate that complexity. It is to decide what to do with it.
Take a multi-cloud networking product. A single screen might touch fifteen real concepts: regions, segments, connectors, peering, route policies, NAT, ACLs, scale groups, and so on. A naive designer treats these as fifteen things to explain. A senior one asks which three the user is actually deciding between right now. The other twelve get pushed into defaults, derived state, or progressive disclosure. Not because they do not matter, but because exposing them costs the user attention they need elsewhere.
One of the biggest reasons the real world resists comprehensive analysis is ‘change’. As someone once said, “In this world, nothing is permanent except change.” The instinct, when faced with change, is to analyze more: more research, more interviews, more frameworks. But analyses lead to more analyses, and eventually decisions cannot be made rationally at all, at least not in the rational tradition of scientific comprehensiveness. The challenge is setting a boundary somewhere during the research, and accepting that the boundary is a design decision in itself.
As a designer with finite boundaries, restrictions or even specific requirements for that matter, you just can’t invest too much time investigating in understanding the real world. At some point of time in a design research you have to be rational.
This is where the old “research everything” instinct breaks. When I interview 50 participants for a mobile app, I am not trying to represent the world. I am trying to recruit fifty people different enough that the variety inside my limited sample makes up for its size. Fifty interviews will tell you fifty problems, and shipping requires you to pick three. The interviews are still worth doing. They just answer a different question than people think: they tell you which problems are real, not which ones to solve.
So here is the honest version of “espouse elucidation”. Every screen is a negotiation between what is true and what is useful. The truth is that the system is complicated. The useful thing is that the user only has to think about a small slice of it at a time. A good designer holds both, and lies as little as possible while still letting the user move forward.
Clarity is not the opposite of complexity. It is the discipline of choosing what to be unclear about.