> Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That always risks being patronizing, but at least we should allow users options and deeper documentation, for those who want to use them -- they shouldn't get punished by being restricted to the lowest common denominator. That doesn't mean there can't be friendly defaults, "wizards", and whatnot.
Oh yes, and it's so deeply ingrained in the culture.
At my previous job, our customer made us use a pretty crappy, proprietary integrated system for task management, bug tracking and version control. Everyone hated it with passion. It took me over a year to finally stop and think for a moment - that maybe it has some more efficient modes of working, and maybe there is some logic to its organization? I clicked Help -> Manual and, lo and behold, I was looking at a large compiled help file describing everything. Every functionality, the fundamental concepts behind the software's UI and data representation. Hell, it even mentioned the API. 30 minutes later, I still didn't like the software, but I was finally somewhat comfortable with it.
I was probably the first person to do that in that company. A lesson here is that unfortunately, the instinct to bitch about software instead of trying to find a manual is strong even in power users. I took that lesson to heart, and these days I'm e.g. very friendly with Info pages in my OS. Turns out if software you regularly use has a decent manual, reading it (or at least skimming, and I mean cover to cover) has absurdly high payoff.
> they shouldn't get punished by being restricted to the lowest common denominator. That doesn't mean there can't be friendly defaults, "wizards", and whatnot.
Exactly. Lower the start of the learning curve, but don't flatten it entirely, don't dumb down your application for the sake of "easy to use". Power always comes with some amount of complexity and learning.
I like to think of it in terms of frequency/duration of use. There may not be many (relatively) "power users", but there are a lot of 9-5 users. People who have to work with a piece software 8+ hours a day at work, day in, day out. If a piece of software has near-flat learning curve, it's contributing a lot to the misery of those people. Like, 6 hours straight of clicking through a slow web UI kind of misery, where unbloating the UI would cut that literally in half, adding keyboard shortcuts would cut that in half again, and a semi-decent batch mode would let them be done in 15 minutes, go get coffee, and start working on something else.
Where's the "value" such "user-friendly" software provides the users again?
And here also lies the answer to the age-old question - why people use Microsoft Excel for everything? Because it's a tool for "power users", with no ceiling in sight. It's flexible where most dedicated software is stiff, which gives people a way to optimize their work.