A person can understand the screen and still inherit a difficult system.
A thought in progress
Complexity rarely begins in the .
A developing observation by Vijay Thamban · 23 Aug 2026
Imagination / responsibility
Continue ↓What I am noticing
04 minute note
04 minute note
A cleaner interface can make a complicated system easier to operate. It cannot make the system itself less complicated.
Sometimes it only makes the complexity harder to see - and easier to move onto someone else.
This opens into: Who lives with the decision? ↓Elsewhere in the system
Four things I cannot quite leave alone.
Not categories. Not finished articles. Just ideas that keep showing up in each other.
01Who lives with the decision?Customer, consumer and the distance between value promised and value experienced.→02When software can act, where does navigation go?A small interaction experiment about AI, agency and control.→03Usable is not the same as understandable.An open question about where complexity goes.→04A component is a decision someone no longer makes.Design systems as distributed judgment, not component libraries.→
Question 01 · Customer / consumer
The person choosing the product may never live with the choice.
In enterprise software, value passes through a system of people. Each person sees a different product because each one carries a different part of the consequence.
Current point of view
The buyer approves a promise: cost, compliance, productivity or reduced risk.
A working principleImagination with responsibility.
Imagine what could be.
Understand what it will do.
Experiment 02 · In progress
What remains of the interface when the product can do the work?
A thought, still open
Clarity is not the end of the problem.
A clear interface can still move complexity somewhere else.
When complexity disappears from one surface, ask where it went.
Clear to whom - and clear about what?
The next useful question is usually hiding downstream.