Nice Quote and Comments about User-Friendliness

"Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it." I have encountered very often the notion that user-friendliness is the quality of being intuitive or, put in Dijkstra's words, the quality of "appealing to the uneducated". It seems that Microsoft can be very active in that respect. Take Word for example, it is sold with the pretense that you don't have to learn to use it but, invariably, you'll have to get accustomed to it and get an intuition of the heuristics used to justify one or another behavior. In other word, because there is the clear criteria guiding the behavior of the system that can be written down, it is believed that you don't need to understand anything to use it. If user-friendliness is to have a non condescending meaning, I would associate it with the simplicity of the design of the system and of its interface. It is acceptable to have to learn how to use a system but the description should be as short and as precise as possible. To those who believe those to be contradictory qualities, I refer to the manual of the Algol language and conclude with a quote by Dijkstra. "About the use of [natural] language: it is vain to try to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to sharpen it with ten blunt axe". E.W. Dijkstra Simon Hudon July 10th 2009 Zürich