Anti-Simplification: Making Things Suck Harder
A decent article entitled ANTI-SIMPLIFICATION - HOW TO MAKE LIFE HARDER FOR USERS from the SAP DESIGN TIDBITS, another excellent site I'll be checking daily.
User interface designers strive to make applications simpler and easier to use. Simplification is a big issue these days, and feature growth is one of the challenges user interface designers have to fight against. So, why should I ask how we can make life harder for users - does that make any sense? Yes, I think it does. If we find out, which factors make applications more complex, we can learn - especially through bad examples that already exist - which pitfalls to avoid. In this article, I present such factors and illustrate them with examples. Most of the examples refer to business software, but many of them apply to form-based Web pages as well.