[Discuss] Its not possible to make things easier for users

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

A trio of late-in-the-thread observations:

  - There is a trade-off between simple and powerful, but one can always 
make both worse by adding a serving of "stupid", conversely, one can 
always make something both simpler *and* more powerful by removing some 
of the unnecessary "stupid" (eventually you might run low on stupidities 
to harvest, so there can be limits, but don't give up too soon using the 
trade-off argument as your excuse). Occasionally one can change the game 
with a hunk of "clever" that later makes the previous idea look stupid.

  - There are some extremely powerful and easy to use technologies out 
there that are made possible by standardization, both in defining what 
the product does and by using powerful standard components. Good 
examples are indeed cars. And phone calls. Note that there sometimes 
needs to be a lot of education about the properties of the product for 
this to happen. Even morons know a lot about what cars are good for and 
what they are not good for, similarly the properties of a phone call are 
well defined, though the phone example has been in a lot of flux in 
recent years. GPS is an amazing set of physics and technologies, yet it 
can be packaged into extremely easy-to-use products once one defines the 
product and engineers it carefully.

  - People do want choice, but they are too busy and ignorant to really 
deal with all that choice. But they still want some choice: I overheard 
two young women in Target the other week, they talking about something 
unknown to me, and the second one didn't need whatever the first one 
suggested because she already had it and "mine has ionic power". God 
maybe knows what that meant, I would be willing to bet a hell of a lot 
of money that she had no idea what that meant, but it gave her the 
impression that it was good, and maybe the term does correlate with some 
real feature. I was once impressed by the name "Formula-409", but that 
was when it was new and I was a pretty little kid--I give myself a pass. 
I am weird because know a lot about how the things around me work (as 
does this BLU crowd), but I don't know how degreasers work beyond a 
basic understanding of soap. Formula-409 is still magic to me. I think I 
know of a better and improved competing product that we have at home and 
if only it had a catchier name I could tell you what it is.

-kb, the once very young Kent who was attracted to technology 
specifically because of the superficial wiz-bang trappings that he now 
scorns.