The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality until only the bare essentials are left. I'd argue this (the UI change, not identifying what c

The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality until only the bare essentials are left. I'd argue this (the UI change, not identifying what can be removed) is always going to be simpler than making the existing UI understandable. A solution which is often asked for by advanced users is a toggle between simple and advanced UI, but this has fundamental problems (The following is inspired by the VLC preferences UI). First, It will be triggered by accident by users who definitely don't want it (or by advanced users sharing the account). How do you ensure they can get back to the simple UI? By definition they are now in a mode which is harder to navigate for a normal user. Second, how do advanced users without extensive knowledge of the internals of the software (non-developers, essentially) locate the controls they were used to from the simple UI? The advanced UI will look fundamentally different from the simple one, because cramming all the advanced features in between the simple ones would just look weird and hacky. Things might even be named differently in the advanced UI because there are technical terms for them which will be more familiar to advanced users. And how do advanced users know if there is even a 1-to-1 mapping (a simple "Dolby Surround" boolean setting vs an advanced "Force Detection of Dolby Surround" boolean setting and "Stereo audio output mode" which can be set to "Dolby Surround")? Third, given finite resources one of the interfaces is going to have more effort applied to it than the other one. How do you ensure that they both stay usable when most users will only ever use one of them?