Rusting Functionality - Hide those Buttons

Attention software developers (and Microsoft that means you in particular): why is it that you feel you have to display every bit of functionality on screen every time we use your apps?

I’ve been thinking alot about functionality, information overload, and the notion of ‘rusting’ about which I blogged recently. To my mind, the classic Google home page is one of the finest GUI designs ever. One box! How amazing is that given the output that that one box then delivered. Compare this with Microsoft Office 2007 to which I’ve just upgraded on my laptop: what a dog’s dinner.

My issue is not that everything should be needlessly simple in functional terms (I like plenty of functionality), it is that everything should be as simple as it possibly can be in the way that it is presented to me as a user. Looking at the default setting on MS Word I am presented with no less than 78 different functions, and that’s before I’ve started running through the menu lists and toolbar options. It’s too much; I just don’t need all this stuff. There are probably only about 6 that I use regularly: print, save, new, copy, paste, and scroll. All the rest just get in the way of my user experience. OK I know that if I want to I can go an change all my options, hide the stuff I don’t need etc. But this is software. Why should I have to do that? Why can’t MS Word do it for me.

So here’s my suggestion for developers: by all means keep that functionality - after all, there may be a day sometime in the future when my life will grind to a halt unless I can make my text run vertically instead of horizontally. But in the meantime, how about hiding most (if not all) of it. Indeed, if you’re as smart as I think you are, why not get your software to track the way that I use its functions and set about hiding all those that I never use (or prioritising those that I use regularly). Why not add some rust to functionality? This to me is the best of both worlds: all the functionality is there if I need it, but I only see the stuff that I use most often. Everything else just fades into the background the less I use it. It doesn’t have to be hard to find the ‘make text vertical’ button (could even use some search functionality for that), but for when I’m not using it (which is most of the time) it would be shut away like my old hand drill which sits on the bottom shelf at the back of the garage: there when I need it but not cluttering up my desktop.

In the spirit of practising what I preach, I’d like to look at GazetMe functionality with this in mind. User feedback though most welcome: which GazetMe functions do you use most often?