Friday, 1 August 2008

Unnecessary Complexity

I just read David Pogue's latest post, which can be found here, about the complexity of software and I could not agree with him more. In fact at one stage I worked on installation applications and constantly pushed for the process to be streamlined and made easier. I thought that about 3 screens could do it for the average user and maybe 5 for the more adventurous. This was not the way it was built however because of the terrible idea in software design: the user is stupid and doesn't know what they're doing so we must take them through it step-by-step by the hand. That did include showing them options on 10 different screen just incase seeing one screen with multiple options might make their head explode.

Anyway fair play to you David I'd love to see software made simpler and here's a cartoon from flickr showing how the software process basically works:

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