David Emery Online

Stupid User Disease

1 March 2006

Today, you get a proclamation:

If you are not a computer or operating system manufacturer, there is no point aiming your software at the lowest common denominator.

If you make software, don’t aim at really basic users – really basic users don’t install software. This, however, doesn’t stop your software being simple – even power users benefit from having less features, they just whine more.

One piece of software I’ve noticed do this to it’s detriment is Camino – a very nice browser for Mac OS X, based on the same engine as Firefox, but with a proper OS X look and feel. It’s a great piece of work, but not something I ever use, as it lacks the features I find essential in a browser. To be fair on them, there’s only so much you can do, and some of the features are coming up (like session saving, for example), but reading on their forums you can see that many features that would be very useful – like tab previews, a la OmniWeb – are written off as being to complicated for their target audience.

But how are this mythical target audience going to find Camino to download? Do the even download software? I seriously doubt it. It’s all well and good for Safari to aim at the low end user, as it’s built in, but very few of these low end users are going to progress to anything else. Most of these users never even touch an applications preferences, let alone download software.

So, in summation: Make your software simple and easy to use, but don’t do it because the users can’t handle it, do it because it makes the program better.