What the hell am I doing? I've built (with AI) a mock up of a shopping interface where I can make it more complex and more simple. But in a usable, production version of this I'm imagining nothing in the user interface is hardcoded and the UI responding to a variable quality of complexity. But how would we go about encoding the interactive elements so that we could filter based on the quality of complexity? And how do we do this for other quality vectors? How do we take a slice through a set of interactive logic? How do we represent the logic of interaction? I don't really know how I got here. But now that I have I need your help to figure out how we do this without AI. Because I want to do this not just for a shopping interface but for all my computing. I want malleable interfaces and interactions where I can filter qualities of the interface easily. If you don't know, then take a guess because I'm after any threads I can get. Cheers!

• in this context, simplicity seems to correlate with entropy (as in "amount of distinct states (user can see/be in/achieve)") • rank sets of states from absolutely required (simple(?)) to nice-to-have (or for power users, complex) – this is your slider. • unroll (impl/UI widgets) dependency graph for each state • solve for combinatorial explosion of mixes of simple/complex widgets. • profit

Thanks @Misha A have you seen any examples of this out in the wild? I'm also wondering about how one describes interaction (input/output) in an abstract way so that it could be rendered in a way that conforms to the end-users preferences. Any ideas? Any examples? Who's working on this kind of stuff? What is it called so I can search for it?

to be able to switch between N implementations in runtime – you need to have N implementations (unless 1 uber one can be rendered as progressively complex, eg by gradually replacing implicit defaults with explicit UI controls). I doubt anyone "has time for that" outside of handmade™ part of a spectrum. I think any toolbar or settings dialog is sort of this: you just stash controls away.

This is similar to some apps that have a special "advanced mode" or "expert mode" toggle in the settings to enable extra UI. A really small example of this is when you enable the devtools in Safari — you get extra menus, keyboard shortcuts, and contextual menu items.

Visually, I'm reminded of Kat Zhang's work, which often uses TouchDesigner to visually and tangible scrub through the "complexity domain" of a subject. I don't know if they talk about how they structure any underlying architecture, or it's all one-off visuals, but they're on Instagram/Patreon/Substack.