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My dad was a D&T teacher (woodwork, electronics, that kind of stuff), but had a background in carpentry and construction. The Corel suite of design products we

My dad was a D&T teacher (woodwork, electronics, that kind of stuff), but had a background in carpentry and construction. The Corel suite of design products were his tools of choice, both in industry and when he became a teacher. To him, CorelDRAW was a leading product, and even now we've got a few old CD's of Corel products lying around the house. It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've been doing something right! Despite being long retired, he'll occasionally work part-time when needed, and when he needed to cover for a few months I helped him get the latest Corel suite, and he really struggled to get on with it. I remember playing with it as a kid, and feeling the same way when I tried it out, so to get his work done I had to hunt down an old copy of CorelDRAW. Corel seems to be a shadow of what it once was, and its software reflects that, so hopefully this acquisition results in better software for the future.

alxlaz 7y ago
A few years ago I asked my dad about this same phenomenon: > It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've been doing something right! I was interested in what exactly made AutoCAD (in my dad's case) so easy to use, because if you've ever worked with it, man, it's anything but. I got to use it during my undergrad classes and the only thing I liked about it was AutoLISP :-). It's polished in every way but it's clearly a program that first hit the market in the 1980s. Turns out my father didn't think it was easy to use at all, either, he thought it was awful. But he really needed it, so he really put in the effort to learn it. It wasn't some super-human feat, it took him about a week of practice on increasingly complicated drawings. He was already great at technical drawing so he just had to figure out how to do it with that weird program. It's been a useful lesson ever since: given the right motivation, people will put up with any UI. Rationalizing the design choices that went into it is not always the best avenue.
- jeremyjh 7y ago
  Tools like this can't be dumbed down, either. They need to expose hundreds of features, not because everyone uses every feature, but because everyone uses a different subset and finds them critical. Its really hard to make a tool like that really user friendly, its simply expert level software.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I would note that Photoshop has had, for about a decade now, a set of “configuration pre-sets” (I forget the exact term) under the Window menu. These allow you to, in a single click, turn off all the menus and palettes except those relevant to the subfield you’re working in. And honestly, Photoshop isn’t even the best candidate for that approach, since some image-manipulation “jobs” can pull in every tool in the toolbox. It’d make perfect sense in a program like AutoCAD, or Excel, or an IDE.
- granshaw 7y ago
  Great great point, especially with the current computing/internet-native generation. UX can be important in a crowded or competitive field, but otherwise, mehhh
- derefr 7y ago
  > Given the right motivation, people will put up with any UI. Another way to think about this is: without the right motivation, people will hate any UI, no matter how good it is, simply because it requires learning (even if the learning ramp is really smooth.) The only way to judge how good a UX design really is (as compared to another UX for the same workflow), is to compare how quickly and well people learn that UX when truly motivated to do so. Otherwise you’re not comparing the UXes themselves, but rather just how much learning your user populations happen to have already been motivated to put into systems more similar to one or the other of your UXes in the past—a result that will be meaningless in anything but the most “targeted at 100% of consumers” of apps.
- specialist 7y ago
  Pre-WYSIWYG & GUI, AutoCAD was basically a REPL for graphics. Great for early adopters. Bad for the general populace.

alxlaz 7y ago

A few years ago I asked my dad about this same phenomenon: > It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've been doing something right! I was interested in what exactly made AutoCAD (in my dad's case) so easy to use, because if you've ever worked with it, man, it's anything but. I got to use it during my undergrad classes and the only thing I liked about it was AutoLISP :-). It's polished in every way but it's clearly a program that first hit the market in the 1980s. Turns out my father didn't think it was easy to use at all, either, he thought it was awful. But he really needed it, so he really put in the effort to learn it. It wasn't some super-human feat, it took him about a week of practice on increasingly complicated drawings. He was already great at technical drawing so he just had to figure out how to do it with that weird program. It's been a useful lesson ever since: given the right motivation, people will put up with any UI. Rationalizing the design choices that went into it is not always the best avenue.

jeremyjh 7y ago
Tools like this can't be dumbed down, either. They need to expose hundreds of features, not because everyone uses every feature, but because everyone uses a different subset and finds them critical. Its really hard to make a tool like that really user friendly, its simply expert level software.
- derefr 7y ago
  I would note that Photoshop has had, for about a decade now, a set of “configuration pre-sets” (I forget the exact term) under the Window menu. These allow you to, in a single click, turn off all the menus and palettes except those relevant to the subfield you’re working in. And honestly, Photoshop isn’t even the best candidate for that approach, since some image-manipulation “jobs” can pull in every tool in the toolbox. It’d make perfect sense in a program like AutoCAD, or Excel, or an IDE.
granshaw 7y ago
Great great point, especially with the current computing/internet-native generation. UX can be important in a crowded or competitive field, but otherwise, mehhh
derefr 7y ago
> Given the right motivation, people will put up with any UI. Another way to think about this is: without the right motivation, people will hate any UI, no matter how good it is, simply because it requires learning (even if the learning ramp is really smooth.) The only way to judge how good a UX design really is (as compared to another UX for the same workflow), is to compare how quickly and well people learn that UX when truly motivated to do so. Otherwise you’re not comparing the UXes themselves, but rather just how much learning your user populations happen to have already been motivated to put into systems more similar to one or the other of your UXes in the past—a result that will be meaningless in anything but the most “targeted at 100% of consumers” of apps.
specialist 7y ago
Pre-WYSIWYG & GUI, AutoCAD was basically a REPL for graphics. Great for early adopters. Bad for the general populace.