Back to basics: bloatware vs. keeping things simple

I remember the first time I tried to download Easy CD. I was in a distant computer with broadband far from my house and wanted to burn some mp3s I downloaded quickly. I had a cd burner but no burning software.

I quickly found out that Easy CD was a 100mb or so download, and I could not be more surprised. A CD burning application that comes in the size of an iso image? Are they insane? Why should the burning application take 100 off my hard drive? (and this was 4 years ago.)

In a recent visit to Nero & Roxio websites I found out the situation today is much worse. Nero requires 288MB of 'permanent' disk space and Roxio's Toast requires 300MB of disk space.

Roxio and Nero forgot how to keep things simple. A burning application should just be able to burn cds and dvds. It shouldn't be the 1-stop-home-media-editor. It doesn't need a wave editor, and a photo organizer.

Disco is a new (very hyped) burning application. It is what one might call a trendy-eyecandy-ish burning application. But other than being really pretty, it has one important feature - it's an insanely small, 700 KB download! It's a small, minimal, simple application that helps me get things done and doesn't take too much space.

Why is that so special nowadays?

Wet Floor Interfaces and user confusion

Nero is a well known CD/DVD burning application. It allows users to create various CD/DVD formats fairly easily.

I've noticed an annoyance in Nero almost instantly when I started using it: It's burning dialog has the Stop button highlighted (focused) by default.

When a user clicks the Burn button in Nero, the dialog above opens and the burning process is started. But Nero makes it far too easy for the user to cancel the process by mistake.

This is what one might call a Wet Floor Interface, it invites user errors when it actually intents to create a clean one-task interface. The burning process is Nero's epicentre but it's interface makes it too easy for users to accidentally slip on the floor and break something.

User interface design is often about making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. Interfaces like Nero's burning dialog are not too hard, but someone should go over them with a towel and wipe the water off the floor.