Comment by rcfox
3 days ago
Ultimately, you need to decide who your target user is. Do you want to cater to the lowest common denominator, or do you want to want to make something power users can customize to fit their workflow?
Neither answer is necessarily wrong, you just need to make a choice.
> you just need to make a choice.
This fallacy is at the heart of the failure of modern software.
Making things work for the median user is almost entirely about defaults and intuitiveness. If everybody is sending messages all the time, there should be a conspicuous button for sending messages.
Making things work for power users is about allowing those defaults to be changed. It's fine if this is five deep in a menu somewhere. It's fine if there is an option for "advanced mode" that opens up a bunch of menus that are otherwise hidden. It's fine if this requires you to write your own filter rules etc., as long as that's available. What's not fine is to make the limited interface the only interface.
Simple things should be easy and complex things should be possible.
> Simple things should be easy and complex things should be possible.
I love this.
Building on this thought: When you are starting to build something, you have very limited resources. Focus only on making simple things easy and forget everything else. Once you have product market fit expand into making complex things possible. This applies to 90% of all products.
Those goals are far less at odds than you seem to be implying.
One of UX principles is exactly trying to do both.
My mom can use gmail, but she doesn’t even know about its hotkeys and accelerators, or Labs and whatnot