HMK's Spurious ThoughtsBiased / Nicht immer ausgewogen

Here‘s an interesting podcast of Brian Ferren’s speech at Web 2.0.
He makes quite a compelling argument for specialized user interfaces to empower users instead of creating standard GUIs using a keyboard, mouse & monitor for computing tasks.
Although his thoughts are probably not applicable for us working in standard Web/PC-UI Environment, they resonate with the end of consistency in GUIs. Maybe those of us doing traditional desktop apps should think “out-of-the-box” when creating a GUI.
Sometimes standard Windows / MacOS controls don’t cut it.

Tilman wonders about 37signals “Less software” approach and concludes that “Less” sometimes is – less!.
Here are a few unstructured thoughts of mine on this very topic:
* The need to integrate a software product in a complex workflow with different, heterogeneous components makes it hard to build “less software”. Interfacing with different machines, different ERP-systems is hard. And complex. Which translates into more, not less software.
* The software 37signals creates is great stuff. The apps work beautifully. However, these are not “mission-critical” apps used by companies to run their core business processes. Plus these apps are very much targeting the “knowledge worker” who’s used to work all day long in front of his/her computer. There are many users out there who don’t want to spend a lot of time in front of their computer & who don’t have the time to play around on their computer. Because they aren’t interested in computers at all plus – more importantly – they get paid to run a business, build real products and face real-world problems. These types of users tend to expect a lot of features with minimum intervention on their behalf.
* You may get away with less features by creating a product which appeals to both tourists & sailors as outlined in Guy Kawasaki‘s The Macintosh Way. However, most likely you’ll end up with powerful software with a great, easy-to-use multi-level UI. To my understanding, that’s not the “less software” approach 37signals is advocating.
However, I still think a lot of the “less software” concepts which came up in the context of 37signals are worth pondering and worth pursuing. Especially if you think about them as related to the well-known YAGNI principle used in XP style software development:

It’s not about anticipating and building what may be needed tomorrow, it’s about building great software for what is needed today.

[Update: Another twist to the topic is that the type of customer I described above wants to pay for features he/she most likely will never use, but doesn't want to pay for simplicity or ease-of-use]

Looks like Don Park is wondering about document-centric computing.
Don, read this first before following this road any further.

Don Park makes an interesting observation on the average computer user, and Dave Winer agrees.
I’ve rambled about this topic quite a while ago: 95% of the UI improvements in Windows Vista or MacOS X are irrelevant to 95% of the computer users out there. Why? Because they don’t address the fundamental challenges these 95% face.
I would even go farther and say that 99% of all past improvements to the Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder (remember the spatial orientation discussion?) were irrelevant to 99% of the users.
[Update: And I don't subscribe to the theory that the Web is a fundamental advance for these 95% of the users, as David Berlind notes. It's not that the desktop (OS) is flawed and the Web-based UIs change that. Web-based UIs just have different kinds of fundamental problems.]

Michael Mahemoff on Error Messages We’d Rather Not See.

Here’s the essence what Apple’s all about:

(Showing remote controls for Windows Media Center and for Apples FrontRow.)
(Screen Capture taken (without permission) from QuickTime stream of the Apple Special Event on Oct, 13 2005).
Hint: It’s not about the size.

Interesting thoughts on Avoiding “Blank Page Syndrome”.
The first question our users asked when confronted with a non-blank document was:

“How do I remove this stuff?”

So the jury is still out on that one. Labelling the “default” sample content as “Example” plus describing that this is only default sample content and will go away requires the users to read (quite a lot) & understand what’s written.
Judging from my experience, this spells trouble.