Less is more

20 August 2007

One of the more interesting things that sparked up while I was away was the controversy surrounding the new version of iMovie that Apple have launched as part of iLife ‘08. You can read a fairly thorough account of the situation over on Appleinsider.

The general thrust of the conversation is along the lines of:

‘Eeeek.’

‘What?’

‘This new version of iMovie doesn’t do the one, vital thing I always used to use it to do!’

‘But doesn’t it make everything else much easier to do?’

‘Yes, but…’

’- and can’t you use the old version still anyway?’

I find it rather fascinating how indignant people can get on the internet. In this situation, nothing is being taken away – the old version still works – but yet their still seems to be an outpouring of bad feeling.

This is, of course, yet another in the long line of examples of how the customer is wrong. The new version of iMovie is better in almost every conceivable way. For the vast majority of users, it makes assembling some movie clips they’ve filmed to upload to the internet – or burn onto a DVD – much easier then before. However, there is one universal truth in software development: you can’t take away features without your users moaning.

This ties in rather nicely with one of the other universal truths in software development: the less features, the better. This one shouldn’t take too much explaining – the less features you have, the less cluttered your interface and the more time you can spend developing them.

Of course, when you try and reconcile these two truths deep into a products life cycle you end up with the (non) mess Apple is purportedly in. Culling features and redesigning is definitely the way to go.

Of course, lets not get into some of the more creative bits of interface Apple have come up with for iMovie – they appear to have taken their cue from iTunes 7, which as since tweaked its UI to be more 10.5-like, leaving iMovie ‘08 in its own (very dark) UI ghetto.

From: Articles

20 August 2007