Yeah - I think good design should be as simple as it can while respecting the complexity of the task. Designers forget that not everyone is building search engine front pages or like, the kind of simple objects with no moving parts that tend to get touted as good design.

I'm building a development environment for professionals using a complicated DSL to interface with a powerful AI. No beginners in emergencies should ever see this thing - my users got graduate degrees to get to this point, and they're going to have to learn to use it to do their job. I'm going to make that as painless as possible, but nothing can have all the required features and make them all obvious in ten seconds.

I think the important idea that is often overlooked these days is discoverability.

Your UI doesn't have to be simple, but the user needs to know where to start. That's the idea behind the original Windows 95 "Start" menu. Even though there is plenty of things on screen, the starting point is marked in the most obvious way possible.

Now the idea seems to be: hide everything but the starting point, which is certainly a good way to show where to start, but it doesn't help the user getting beyond that, if it is possible at all.

Interestingly, that learning curve is well studied in video games, and often well implemented. General UI seems to be focused on aesthetics more than anything else.

In my personal experience what I discovered is that designing a good complex system always starts by reducing it to its minimal terms first and only then you can re-expose the complexity. This is less true when you are designing from scratch and way more true when you have something that has (dis)organically grown.

Edit: typos.

That depends: will your users actually advance beyond the beginner level. If your complex design turns them off they won't learn and never advance unless forced to.

However it is important to remember that if your product is successful the vast majority of your users will not be beginners and so you need to make sure their experience is good.

Alan Kay said it: "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible."

For example, something like Twitter fails massively here. It's easy to use as a novice, but there's no progression (I know that sounds like a concept from games, but it seems applicable). I want to be able to see who, of all the users I've seen, listed, followed, is active these days. I want to be able to draw on other people's list of follows to extract suggestions of who might be good to follow & is actively tweeting (not dumb automatic suggestions, please).

It would be so amazing to be able to "bin" Twitter users (across all of my lists, follows etc.) by how active they are. So the excessively chatty ones can be browsed when I have time, and the ones that post almost never—well, when they do, I see it.

Yeah, this is a major misconception. Designers often forget how quickly people can get used to complex things, if they're using them day-in, day-out. Simple is bad design if it gets in the way of virtuosity.