Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

5-8. Commands and Transformers

A good design is better than you think.

—Rex Heftman

We are justifiably annoyed when a product, a piece of software, or a computer system imposes complexity beyond our needs and presents difficulties we do not understand. We want to do some simple word processing, but we are forced to take in hand hundreds or, as in the case of Microsoft Office, thousands of commands and methods that we do not need. If, on the other hand, we brought in each of those commands as we understood our need for them, then the feeling of imposition and the immense cognitive burden would be lifted, even if the eventual system turned out as complex as the original application.

By applying the concept that a system should not be more complex ...