Dave Winer told me he writes software for people who are very smart and very, very busy. I found his attitude refreshing–too many techy types treat the people who buy our stuff with secret contempt.
Jakob Nielsen, for instance, plans for users who are both lazy and stupid. (What was that joke–“Your interface is so ugly, Nielsen hates it”?) But why not give users ugly interfaces, whose simplicity shoves them rudely toward what they need?
Across the house, my husband is playing Mozart–the sound of it fills the kitchen and makes me smile. Even the odd blurred chord or hesitation tells its own story of struggle and aspiration.
Professional pianists, like professional tech folk, spend hours every day improving their skills. The rest of us fit in our practice-and-learning around the rest of our lives–which doesn’t make us lazy and stupid people.
And programmers, like Dave Winer, who understand that, write better software than people who just don’t get it.