[jrochkind1]

If people don't know the difference between diesel and gasoline, is a note that says "Note: Diesel is not the same as Gasoline" going to help? Doubt it.

The assertion is that 'configuration creep' is overwhelming for the unsophisticated user in the first place, adding even more notes and explanations to all the configuration options is not going to help.

[pessimizer]

>If people don't know the difference between diesel and gasoline, is a note that says "Note: Diesel is not the same as Gasoline" going to help? Doubt it.

Really? I would think that sign would help everyone who knew how to read, bothered to read, and wanted their car to run. A sign with a simple message like that was enough to fix one national timeclock system that I worked on. "Do not do X before 12:00 Noon unless Y." in English, Spanish, and Polish.

For the people who still messed it up that we found by using heuristics on all of the punch data, we sent reports to their managers that said that they had probably done something wrong. After 3 or 4 cycles of this, the failure rate went from 15-20% to 1-2%.

Unsophisticated users remain unsophisticated users if you systematically remove configuration until the application only does one thing one way, badly.

[jrochkind1]

If they don't know the difference between diesel and gasoline, how do they know if the one they want is "diesel" or "gasoline"?

But, yes, clearly, the goal is removing configuration until the app does one thing well, not badly.

[pessimizer]

Only if you want 9000 apps, because then it becomes a question of which of those super narrowly focused apps will work to do what you want to do. An email client that only emails your mother is a good emailing your mother client, but a bad email client. If they take away configuration for people with stepmothers or two mothers, because it's only a 5% use case, it's even a bad emailing your mother client.

If you know your car runs on gasoline, and you don't know the difference between gasoline and diesel, then you see a sign that says "diesel is not gasoline," you know that diesel is not what you're looking for - even though you still don't know the difference.

[jessaustin]

I doubt anyone makes the diesel-gasoline mistake more than once. Browsing to a broken or insecure site (never mind that the brokenness or insecurity is due to javascript being off and on respectively), however, is done all the time.