[IxDA Discuss] can we make it to easy?

[J. Ambrose Little]

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 9:04 AM, Jared M. Spool <jspool at uie.com> wrote:

>
> On May 3, 2008, at 7:49 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote:
>
> Sorry Jared, unless you cite people who've told you otherwise, I'm not
> > buying it. I've never heard anyone in the software industry ever make the
> > claim they makes things complicated on purpose.
> >
>
> Sorry to break it to you Andrei,  but just because *you* haven't seen it
> doesn't mean it doesn't exist. :-)
>
> I'll chime in and say I know a smaller company that builds community
software that follows this model, sort of.  They don't intentionally make
things obscure, they just don't make efforts to make it easy.  It seems to
me that any moderately feature-rich software will inherently evolve towards
complexity, so unless efforts are made to keep it simple and usable, it will
naturally become difficult and arcane.

The thing is, lots of software is built with an engineering mindset, where
complexity is not necessarily seen as a bad thing (or even recognized as
complex).  So lots of software has been built that is complex by default, in
a sense.  And some companies do recognize this and rather than investing in
design and usability, they use it as an opportunity for revenue, sometimes
the only source of revenue.

--Ambrose