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For craigslist specifically, I think people often confuse "simple" with "pretty". Craigslist is a remarkably simple interface. I've never seen anyone - regardle

For craigslist specifically, I think people often confuse "simple" with "pretty". Craigslist is a remarkably simple interface. I've never seen anyone - regardless of age or proficiency with computers - get confused while using it. It does what it sets out to do, without pretension or fluff. If that's considered unsimplistic, I don't know what the word means. I think the argument is a little different for Photoshop, but I'm not a user and frankly I do find it confusing. But like the mixer analogy, a professional tool should sometimes sacrifice simplicity for utility.

ageektrapped 11y ago
> I think people often confuse "simple" with "pretty". Oh man, this. Even richer is confusing usable with pretty. I guess nowadays people say "user experience" instead of usability, or the extremely unfortunate: UX. Simple usually covers the very first prototype version, but then there are always requests for complicating the feature set so you can't have a simple interface anymore. Joel Spolsky had a conference talk about this once (can't remember where I saw it). There is a tension between simplicity and power: some need simplicity; others, power. It's a spectrum. What developers and designers should strive for is elegance so that one can move along the spectrum without noticing it.