Today, Joel had a post about Simplicity. To me, his point was “it’s not simplicity that sells, its complexity”.  I find this an interesting perspective coming from someone who has a product (FogBugz) that is incredibly simple and whose simplicity is one of its biggest selling points.  Now, this is not a criticism of either Joel or FogBugz.  Hey, I love FogBugz. I use it all of the time, and it rarely gets in my way. And, it allows me to do things that more “complex” systems don't.  Because of its simplicity  .

I think people (and developers, especially) get seduced by “simplicity”.  It isn’t about simplicity, its about (first) usability.  Usability is a particularly personal thing.  To extend Joel’s example, what I do with a word processor isn’t necessarily what a Marketing worker will do with a word processor.  We both want the feature sets that we “need” to do our jobs.  What we don’t want is to have the features that we don’t use get in the way of what we do use.

12/11/2006 4:24:25 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development