That Old Time Software, the end of an Era

Khoi Vinh is the Design Director of the New York Times. He blogs about Design over at Subtraction and he's one of my favourite reads. He's observant, perceptive and a highly talented and entertaining writer and designer.

He writes in a recent post about That Old Time Software that he's had it with complex software:

I also think that we’re at a stage now where software interfaces just have to be more immediately intuitive than ever before, have to tell a story with extreme compactness and on first pass. There’s still a long way to go in raising the bar for good interfaces, but it’s much higher now even than where it sat at the end of the last century. In the intervening years, there have been too many good interfaces — still not enough in general, but enough to show us that software design can accomplish much more with much less.

He goes on to signify the end of an era.

Web applications have tremendously abridged the opportunity window for all new software, whether it resides on the desktop or the network.

Much of this is not news to many readers, I’m sure. But sometimes, in the midst of change, it’s easy to overlook the fact that we’ve moved from one era to another. Maybe two years ago it would still have been passable to ship an application like that. Today, it’s puzzlingly anachronistic. In a few more years, it’ll just be completely unacceptable.

Of course I agree with Khoi's vision. It is totally unacceptable to produce and ship customer hostile web applications or software.

However I keep seeing complex feature loaded unusable web applications come to the market only to frustrate users and waste clients' valuable time and money.

What customer hostile web applications have you run into lately? Link it up!

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