[lazyjeff]

The first bit of this article is similar to Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" philosophy, but the proposed solution of "simple command prompt" seems strange to me.

The author gives an example of what a todo list app should do: 'Users should be able to press cmd+E and just type in "buy milk today #personal, high priority.'

But the issue with command line syntax is there's no discovery there. The syntax and keyboard shortcut are obvious to the author because they created this, but no one else would realize what's possible or not, without a whole lot of trial-and-error. Even Google's fairly simplistic query syntax has taken years for a small number of people to use, and for the majority they are still surprised that they can use a + or quotes.

The last bit is about task-centric design, which is also a tradeoff. You design for a common tasks, but this butts against the 80/20 rule in many applications that 80% of users use 20% of features, but for each user it's a different 20%.

Anyways, I think we have to be careful of reducing design to catchphrases based on a few anecdotes. Design is usually about tradeoffs, and is situation-dependent.