I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that didn't h

I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that didn't have any user interface to speak of. It relied on Google Drive to host all the files that the staff and teachers at his Parish needed to edit, and all they needed to do was leverage their existing knowledge of the OS's file system and Microsoft Word to do it. A script runs every half-hour to update the static site based on the changes to and additions of files in their shared Google Drive account. All of the pictures come directly from their Facebook account via the Facebook API and the weekly PDF newsletter is sent using Mailchimp and pulled from their Google Drive as well. They went from almost no engagement from the staff to close to 100% engagement after we implemented the system. Before that the site was built on Drupal and needlessly complex. Nobody used it. It's so easy to forget how daunting learning another user interface can be for the average person. We may think we're being clever when we create our beautiful snowflake UI's but all we're doing is adding more work to somebody's already full plate (and K-12 teachers' plates are overflowing). There's a lot of cognitive overhead that comes with things like remembering username/password combinations, how to upload files to a website (or understanding what that even means), navigating around a website, editing text in something other than Microsoft Word, and other skills and knowledge we take for granted. With the Google-Drive-As-A-CMS implementation, none of the teachers had to learn anything new. They simply needed to leverage skills they were already expected to have (filesystems, Word, Excel, Powerpoint). I'd love for more of us software developers and designers to take a step back and ask ourselves the question "am I making my user's life easier, or am I adding complexity to it?". The honest answer might give us pause.