I found an article about usability and the need for simplicity to make things usable. I find the commentary quite pertinent in the job that I do. I am a UI guy. And before you ask me whether I'm a designer or a coder, let me answer that I'm the latter. But I do design UIs as well. Or at least I used to.
I worked on several features in my earlier product that were redesigned from ground up to make things to make things more usable. And basically, this article says exactly what I feel. Infact, sometimes I feel that the products at my present company need a bit of that treatment. Hmm, let me learn what it does first :D.
The title of this entry reflects the main theme of the said article. It talks about why more and more consumers and customers are daunted to no end by the ever increasing technological advances in the products they buy because these advances are not packaged nicely. It compares MSN's and Yahoo!'s home page with Google's and goes on to explain exactly what's right with Google's home page.
Great technology doesn't necessarily mean that you need to expose it all to the user in one go. The product should give access to the seven main tasks that the user wants to perform, and all the rest should be hidden away, to explore when the user feels up to it. To give an example of what user interface should not be, you should look at a popular accounting software called "Tally". The folks who've made this monstrosity have forgotten about all the small businesses who'd like the help of a great accounting software, but can't afford to hire accountants to run it!
Winzip 8/9, Ahead Nero 6/7 and blogger.com are all examples of places where this concept is put to good use.
You can read the original article for more insight and examples here, it's titled "The Beauty of Simplicity".
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