Myk Melez on Snowl

Myk Melez, lead developer of Snowl at Mozilla Labs took the time to sit down and talk about what’s up with the next major update.

People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. That’s not necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability. When someone wants to do something on their computer, they want to spend their time doing it, not deciding how to do it. For instance, Microsoft Windows provides you with at least four different ways to launch applications and services on your computer: desktop icons, a quick-launch bar, type-to-open, and a Start Menu. Each one of these mechanisms is useful in one or two situations but horrible in others, and each has completely different instructions for operation. Microsoft even gives you a wealth of choices to configure them the way you want, which makes the situation that much more complex.

The less burdened a user’s mind is with irrelevant decisions, the more clear their mind is to accomplish what they need to get done.

I’m looking for examples of this principle in action on the web. What are your favorite examples of where the designers couldn’t make up their mind, and littered an interface with choices that simply get in the way. Where have you seen similar problems tackled in more elegantly