Moving Parts in Software
While there are several aspects that can increase software complexity and cause poor usability, what
can hurt users most is the number of moving parts in a software. Most
developers I know like to make things "configurable". It is good, isn’t it,
to allow your power-users to be able to configure the software to suite
their needs. Possibly, but over-emphasis on configuration can hurt usability
badly.
Imagine a number of "advanced configuration" options scattered across
several configuration files (some times in jar/ear files). Users will have
to take a lot of pain to "discover" those options, make the right
configuration "choices", and then when the software moves from dev to
staging to production, make sure those right choices are repeated in every
step. This is nightmare.
One of the questions I like to ask during design is whether software can
made smart enough to discover its environment, and make the right choices
automatically without even exposing those choices to users. In some cases,
those choices can be derived from other choices. May be, the truth lies with
the fact that most of us involved with software do not have a complete
understanding of how the software will be used, and therefore we translate
our ignorance into more moving parts that require user tuning. It is a
temptation worth resisting.
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