Five Sketches™

Some software companies add ever more features to their software as a way to differentiate it from its competitors. Lucinio Santos’ lengthy analysis of sophistication versus complexity includes this graphic:

An excellent example of simplification is the Microsoft Office ribbon. Many users who upgrade dislike the ribbon for months because of the sheer amount of GUI change it imposes, but the ribbon […]

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the worst mistakes in GUI design are domain-specific. Usually, he says, applications fail because they:

solve the wrong problem.
have the wrong features for the right problem.
make the right features too complicated to understand.

Nielsen’s last point reminds me of what a product manager once told me: many users of highly specialised software […]

This Eric Burke comic is funny because it reflects the way people in the software business feel, at times: