> it's because users actually find it easier I have extreme doubts about that. Yes, people find these things easier when they don't understand them, but what a

> it's because users actually find it easier I have extreme doubts about that. Yes, people find these things easier when they don't understand them, but what about users who do understand? I know for a fact that when I started out programming, Scratch was very easy. But as I became better, the GUI aspects that made it simple became hindrances. I sincerely doubt there has been any research done on this at all, because it simply isn't feasible to ask someone to spend several hundred hours practising something over the course of a study. > Now you have to look two places Many pieces of software present more than one piece of information on the screen at once, and the only way to do this is to put that information in different locations. The idea that you need to look at both is a little silly, because you don't need to know how a document will be styled to type the text of it in. > WYSIWYG is not preferred because it's easier to develop or maintain, it's because users actually find it easier than remembering how to invoke the exact sequence of characters in a document to get what they want Well I am a user, and this is not true for me. My mother has always been horrible with computers, but she worked as a secretary when early document processing software came on to the scene and she managed just fine typing the commands in. "Remembering words" is not a difficult activity. You remembered many hundreds of words to write that reply and I doubt you found it challenging in the slightest. Learning words is difficult, but once you have learned them, they are easy to remember. When I've seen professionals using software, they tend to avoid the GUI. Users remember many hundreds of key shortcuts (much harder to learn than words as they're just arbitrary letters) and do everything in their power to avoid using the GUI for anything, to the point where many people who do things such as video editing have an entire extra keyboard for entering auto-hotkey scripts. Advanced users are not only capable of learning, but actively prefer it to using a GUI. Users who don't know the functionality of software want some simple way to have it all presented to them. But users who know what the software is capable of find this to be a drag. They already know the command they want the software to execute and so want to have the simplest possible way to communicate that desire to the program.