Testing Complexity You Can't Simplify Away

Some interfaces are complex because they're badly built. Others are complex because the domain genuinely is. On Menora's Agent Zone, the agent-fee flow falls squarely into the second camp — its depth is real, multi-axis filtering across many fields and conditional rules. You can't design that away; you can only make it legible. That distinction matters to a PMO, because it changes what "done" means and how you schedule validation. I planned usability testing not as a one-time gate before launch, but as checkpoints woven through delivery, so we caught comprehension problems while they were still cheap to fix. We watched agents actually work the fee flow and the multi-axis filters, and the failures were rarely about aesthetics — they were about whether someone could predict what the next filter would do. For planning, that gave me honest signals: which flows were ready, which needed another pass, and where the risk actually lived. Testing complex enterprise flows isn't about chasing a clean score. It's about retiring uncertainty on a schedule — so the PMO can commit to dates that survive contact with real users.