I stumbled across this post a while back, and having just re-read it, I've had a bit of deja vu. Both then and now, my initial reaction was of acceptance and a knowing nod. I've both said "i haven't got time for that" (excel is my flaw - and I'm really trying to address this) (though in part this is from getting Crystal Reports which I know fairly well and pointing it at my spreadsheets) (ok, ok, I'm a fraud!) and had people approach me because I've been seen "playing" with some app which I others can't find the time to invest to learn and want me to pass my knowledge over asap.
Then, both then and now, my little "oh-oh" rings. You see, I spent a bit of time recently touching on interaction design, and Coopers excellent "The Inmates are running the Asylum". And this post is a prime example of the unbelievable arrogance of all those programmers and geeks and IT spods (which I do fall into on occasion, then have to kick myself) who love the challange of learning, or the cognitive friction. Cooper separates them as "apologists" - those who point to the power/functionality of an application, blithely ignoring the difficulity of actually using it - and the "survivalists", the ones that know there is something terribly wrong with the applications they use, that a problem exists. Survivalists know what easy is, know what hard is, and know full well that interacting with computers is hard.
So, this is just a reminder to me - to challange what I read, even when recommended from a good source. And to develop software that meeets the users needs, accurately, with the minimum cognitive friction possible. I want users who use software I analyse to turn round and say "its easy to use", "its intuitive", "it does all I want and no more", "it works out what I want to do, and just does it". And I'll be doing just this on a new "project" which more will be said of soon...
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