[divvlr]

I liked this post. I would say not only do developers need to dumb down their sites. I would say people are really really lazy you have to build everything to bring the content to the user. Ajax is a great way to do this. I try to design my sites like it's for kids. Almost no words and very pretty. Then anticipating where the user will look and what do they expect to happen.

I would have at one time agreed dumbing down is dumb. However, I heard once that it takes a more "intelligence design" (pun intended) to make something that is really easy to use. Then a design where people have to figure out what's going on.

Also there is always psychology when dealing with people. Take the McDonald's arches, they're yellow because it's believed the color yellow makes you hungry. Pink turns out to be a depressing color. Green and blue which you see a lot has ties to our innate senses. So I would say in response to the comments about colors, I think taking the time to think about it is important. Not only because you want to deal appeal inane user critiques but also because you're using every part of your SAAS design as utility.

[BasDirks]

Calling it "dumbing down" doesn't help its case, but I agree with your point.

[sdotsen]

I'm sure by me saying "dumbing it down," will alienate some folks but I think I got my point across. I've worked with designers and developers who swear by their code. If you try to explain to them that a button was hard to find, they'll tell you it was designed that way for a reason. I used to work for an e-commerce company and every design decision we made for the site was based on one of two ppl's opinion. We would often use A/B testing, but I would say 80% of the things we put into production was because the VP of Marketing wanted things his way.