Make it simple

Business Week has an interview with Dennis Boyle from IDEO. He says, "People don’t want to read a manual. They don’t want something confusing that makes them look dumb. What regular people want is a product that does a few things really well."

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard software managers and project managers say "we’ll have to document that well" or "that’s a training issue" when they come across a difficult to understand feature or a confusing process. If you have to train it or document it, fix it instead. [via Tomalak]