twenty-nineSIMPLICITY
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2006
Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated (www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html): "But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacked what they considered to be 'critical' features. So, what do people mean when they ask for simplicity? One-button operation, of course, but with all of their favorite features."
A long time ago, I wrote the following (Joel on Software, Apress, 2004):
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, ...
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