Comment by mschuster91
4 years ago
That is because designers usually tend to push for "making stuff easy for users" by removing options, whereas engineers tend to like to expose everything configurable so that power users can customize the application to their optimal experience.
I think that "old school Windows" aka Win95-Win7 (where you could still use the classic Windows UI) and "old school MS Office" was the perfect balance between "keep it easy enough for users to get started, with clear visual distinction to aid them" and "allow power users to work as well", and that was a large part of why MS Windows and MS Office became so utterly dominant. Only when MS started to go bonkers with Vista and then the disasters that followed from a design perspective, users suddenly started to look for alternatives.
> That is because designers usually tend to push for "making stuff easy for users" by removing options
Yeah, although I think product managers are worse offenders. I think neither extreme is good. Customization is important but hard to get right, and creates rigidity and burdens for developers as well. One thing that engineers ignore, is the cost of mandatory customization or learning curves. Most users, even technical ones, may never get around to customizing so the defaults are more important than the full set of options. And engineers often underestimate the importance of sensible defaults. Google, for instance, had entire products that people didn't know about because they couldn't make users aware of them, despite them being free and good.
> "old school MS Office" was the perfect balance between "keep it easy enough for users to get started, with clear visual distinction to aid them"
I think that was an extremely cluttered UI, far more than saturation the attention of a new user. But otherwise I agree that hiding everything in menus or omitting features is not the solution either.