[IxDA Discuss] can we make it to easy?

[Will Evans]

In a way, we've seen this "erosion of value" happen before. The first
Mac brought desktop publishing to the consumer - and to this day, we
are inundated with poorly designed flyers and newsletters.

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:55 AM, Shep McKee <shep.mckee at gmail.com> wrote:

> In a way, we've seen this "erosion of value" happen before. The first
> Mac brought desktop publishing to the consumer - and to this day, we
> are inundated with poorly designed flyers and newsletters.
>

Agreed -  on the other hand - no matter how "easy" desktop publishing/design
tools are - they will never replace a designer with a non-designer. in
things that matter. You either know typography or you don't, and access to
the entire adobe font folio doesn't replace training, education, and years
of critique. When notepad was replaced by wysiwyg, the web proliferated with
web sites -- 99.999% were complete crap. And even in the design community -
many print designers with strong design backgrounds jumped on the web and
made some of the most aesthetically pleasing and completely
useless/unusable/inaccessible sites around (this continues now with agencies
building flash sites like crack addicts).

But to Mark's point - when I was doing extensive user research for a complex
quantitative software package for risk modeling - many of the users did in
fact take mastery of the very complex software package as a point of pride -
and frankly didn't want me there doing contextual inquiry because they were
frightened by the idea of the software becoming easier/simpler to use. The
were well paid, and behaved almost like priests in charge of sacred rituals
with their mystical ability to create probability curves out of ether
through incantations and sacred rituals - they didn't want a protestant
reformation of the process - their power gave them comfort.