Applications shouldn’t take a lot of time to learn, they should be designed to perform the operations that really matter to the user in an efficient way.

One example are advanced search engines on websites, most users don’t really care about the extra options, and if they try to perform advanced searches they give up easily because they have to perform a lot of steps. In contrast if you look at the search engine on the Apple Itunes store, you will see that they don’t ask you if you want to search by tittle or artist, they just search for what you ask, and it does a very good job.

But when I’m talking about simplicity, I’m not saying you have to develop just a few simple features for your users, if you do that your application wouldn’t sell that well. Mot users go with applications that offer the most features. What will be nice is to develop automated simple features that will help users achieve more in less time.

At the end we should always try to design and develop simple yet useful applications, that don’t get in the way when users try to perform an action. That’s when good Interaction Design comes in to play, and applications just feel right when we use them.