I'm as against bloatware as the next person, although feature overkill is
sort of like pornography: "you know it when you see it," which means the
definition remains completely relativistic.
However... I am someone who uses the deep features of software, and usually
without reading the manual. I don't want to be pestered with them, but I
like that I can find and harness real software power when I want it.
But there's a bigger danger to warn of here, the dangers current mass media
missteps provide the warning signs for, inadvertently. Lowest common
denominator. (are you as sick of "reality TV as I am?)
When we start lumping all into a mass, as in the mass of mass media, it
becomes the demographic of One, the oppressive and tyrannical demographic
of the monolith, and excuse me whilest I run screaming from the room.
I was drawn to interactive media because it deconstructed the mass of mass
media; it dared to say one-to-many is evil and there can be something
better, something even better than niche marketing and demographic
hair-splitting on speed, something sometimes called many-to-many, but is
really about diversity and about resisting the urge to lump audiences into
undiscerning categories, even the category of "audience", which necessarily
constructs those in that category as passive consumers, and not interactive
co-creators.
That's really all I have to say, except to point up the irony of a term I've
seen from time to time, a term that fills me with the overwhelming urge to
sneeze "bullshit!"
<tangent>
"Consumer-Generated Content." As in, huh?! Who came up with that brilliant
term? Will it one day fall into the annals of "jumbo shrimp" et al?
I'm less offended by the term "user-generated content," because making use
of something is doing something, an active activity. Consumer? A consumer is
one who consumes something that is made by someone else. So what the hell is
"consumer-generated content" except what (I suspect) is a marketing
industry's deep structure refusal to accept the idea of active participants,
CREATORS, makers, speakers with real voices, rather than the dominant
marketing desire for compliant, passive, happy with what they are spoon-fed,
"consumers." (we could dig even deeper for irony here, and note the history
of tuberculous gave us a term for what happens when consumers consume
themselves... Consumption?)
Consumer-generated content, a variation of horseless carriages, the name
given to a thing by those who can't accept change except to define it in
terms of what is known and familiar in the past, the good old days, the old
time religion, when marketing was delivered to audiences assumed to be
passive and one-size-fits-all for a mass media compliant consumer who did
what he or she was told and liked it!
Is it really true traditional media can't deal with this radical idea of
active creators talking back to the big media bosses, so we gotta diminish
it by calling it by the old names, by defining it completely in terms of
what we want these people to be, not what they are?
</tangent>
Chris
On Feb 19, 2008 9:18 AM, Marty DeAngelo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At the Adaptive Path UXi conference, they spoke almost specifically
> about this - the fact that new webapps are coming out that try to give
> 20% of the functionality that 80% of the users will use instead of being
> everything for everybody. They used Writely as an example (which has
> since been bought up by Google) to show that people usually only need a
> subset of what is offered in Microsoft Word.
>
> The presentation made a good point that while those extra features are
> interesting and even useful in some situations, many people will never
> use them and have trouble finding what they DO need amidst the broad
> choices offered.
>
> I for one think that the "Less is More" mentality makes a lot of sense,
> because the interfaces get so complicated that even veteran users get
> lost going for features that would be somewhere around 26-50 on the
> 'most used' list.
>
> -- Marty
>
> > Probably unsurprisingly, these numbers appear to show some kind of
> "Pareto principle" usage ("20 % of the application commands are used in
> 80 % of the time"). Does your experience support this?
> >
> >
> > [1]
> > http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/most-frequently-used-features
> > -in.html
> >
> > --
> > Jens Meiert
> > http://meiert.com/en/
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