On 06/08/2015 08:15 AM, scott wrote:
> The difficulty with software like MS Office it is used by a huge range
> of people with very different requirements. My mum wants to type a
> letter and struggles to change the line spacing to make it look right.
> My gf wants to make a form in Word with boxes for people to check and
> type in. I want a complex workbook in Excel with macros. Designing a UI
> that works well for all those people cannot be easy.

Where I work, we have this exact problem.

Half of our customers barely know how to operate a computer, and are 
utterly baffled by our product. They just want a big black box with a 
massive "find the file I need" button in the middle. (Because, you know, 
software is telepathic.) And then the *other* half of our customers want 
more and more sophisticated searching capabilities. People have asked 
for stuff like regex searching and a search predicate builder wizard.

Wanna take guesses how a person who barely knows what a "file" is will 
react to a "regular expression engine"?

The problem is trying to build a single product that does everything for 
everybody. That is an extremely hard problem. It's almost impossible to 
keep *everybody* happy...

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