It just works!

Great little piece of writing by Scott about the fact that some stuff just does not work easily enough and how people will seek out maybe pretty complex ways of doing things just to be confident that it will work first time every time.  This is right up my street, I really like things that ‘Just work’ and MS and the Linux community need to really focus on that effortless simplicity.  For inspiration I look at the Nokia phone UI, (6310i in my case), and the Blackberry which I think is inspirational from a UI design standpoint and reliability standpoint.  How much of what we use in IT every day from any supplier would pass the test, effortless, reliable, intuitive etc and to what extent are these attributes sacrificed for fancy features, customizability etc.

One of the most impressive things about Scott’s post?  He wrote it all on his Tablet PC using the new input panel in SP2, his experience ‘it just worked’, that was my experience to with the alpha, except in Lotus Notes which kept crashing, so I had to uninstall it!!