We have a design philosophy here at Graphient. It’s actually encoded right into our mission statement. The relevant bit is the part about making tools simple enough for any user but powerful enough for business and science. We’re making a tool that does very complex, powerful things and it needs to appear to the casual user that it does them in a very simple and straightforward way. At the same time, if someone puts the effort in to learn our software, complexity and depth should be revealed to him or her proportionally to their understanding of the tool.

After going through a lot of different metaphors in seeking to explain this philosophy to people outside the company I have settled on this: The ideal user interface is like a kiddy pool that is a mile deep. Anyone one should be able to jump in and paddle around, but an experienced user should be able to dive deep in.

I would say that FreeTime, our first product comes close to this ideal. We’re still going to have to include some set up assistants to help people along initially. To push our metaphor a little too far, these will be like flotation devices for novice swimmers.

More on that as it develops.