Posted on Wednesday 30 November 2005 - Popularity: 2%
Do you develop for yourself or for your target audience? In case you’re not the main user of what you create, here’s a friendly reminder to make technology simple and not just expand your feature set to impress your friends and a small group of geeks. From the following article:
This leads me into my main argument. It is not computers that are confusing to the users, it is the developers themselves. “I can’t make it any simpler, it has to be this way. Either way, they can figure it out.” Come on! Most users don’t want to learn anything or take time figuring stuff out. If it isn’t exactly easy to understand, they won’t want to use the product.
This of course doesn’t mean that you always have to create simplistic apps. For example if you create an app that’s mainly used by other devs, then more features can actually be a good thing even if the app isn’t that easy to use anymore. Always have the target audience in mind before you add a new feature and only develop just for you if the only user of the app will be you.
February 20th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
I would like to point out that I put up a follow up post to this. It doesn’t directly mention Mac but I think you guys could make some use of it. http://cjpro.wordpress.com/2006/02/20/simple-technology-2-ten-rules-for-making-simple-guis/