>> Incidentally the solution is not fewer features, but better UI.
I completely agree in principle. The problem is IMHO that the best UX is almost no UI.
Microsoft UI is IMHO essentially industrial automation. Select you data, then push a button (or menu item, or ribbon) to cause something to happen to your data. Apple attempts to encourage more direct interaction with data. The best example is pinch zoom. Remember when maps used navigation buttons to pan and zoom? Direct touch manipulation is better. This is very hard to do with a large feature set though.
One solution is hot-keys, but they do require learning and are limited in number. Context dependent hot keys can also be confusing.
In solvespace we have almost no UI and hot keys are critical to productivity. We avoid context dependence partly by having consistency. The constraint solver is always present, from 2d sketching to building an assembly, so those function keys are universal.
I completely agree in principle. The problem is IMHO that the best UX is almost no UI.
Microsoft UI is IMHO essentially industrial automation. Select you data, then push a button (or menu item, or ribbon) to cause something to happen to your data. Apple attempts to encourage more direct interaction with data. The best example is pinch zoom. Remember when maps used navigation buttons to pan and zoom? Direct touch manipulation is better. This is very hard to do with a large feature set though.
One solution is hot-keys, but they do require learning and are limited in number. Context dependent hot keys can also be confusing.
In solvespace we have almost no UI and hot keys are critical to productivity. We avoid context dependence partly by having consistency. The constraint solver is always present, from 2d sketching to building an assembly, so those function keys are universal.
UX is hard, but also distinct from UI.