[ageektrapped]

> I think people often confuse "simple" with "pretty".

Oh man, this.

Even richer is confusing usable with pretty. I guess nowadays people say "user experience" instead of usability, or the extremely unfortunate: UX.

Simple usually covers the very first prototype version, but then there are always requests for complicating the feature set so you can't have a simple interface anymore.

Joel Spolsky had a conference talk about this once (can't remember where I saw it). There is a tension between simplicity and power: some need simplicity; others, power. It's a spectrum. What developers and designers should strive for is elegance so that one can move along the spectrum without noticing it.