Anyone use Spotify? For those that don’t it is a service that allows you to play thousands of music tracks for free (with adverts) or for a small monthly cost (without adverts).
It recently launched a new version of its application that integrates a range on new social features.
So what’s this got to do with Legal IT? Well Spotify has done what a whole host of legal IT vendors have done for years, they’ve gone and over complicated what was a very simple application!
Software vendors (and I suspect this can be levelled at Legal IT depts too!) tend to feel the need to add functionality on release of a new version. Which is fair enough, but if you do your key task extremely well (like Spotify previously) why add to it?
There is a lot to be said for just keeping applications to the functions they do well, if you want to deliver a new version maybe think “what can we take away?”. As I quoted in a previous post : “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, Antoine de Saint Exupéry.
Good point, well made. On a similar theme, I can’t bear the new trend for ‘ribbonising’ even small apps. The ribbon in MS Office is cool because each of those apps – from Word to Visio – are so stuffed full of features that the ribbon is a good ‘coping and promoting’ interface.
But SnagIt’s introduction of the ribbon is just annoying. SnagIt used to have just one toolbar with all the features on, but now – unnecessarily – they’ve split the features across ribbon tabs, thus increasing the number of clicks you need to make for each feature you use, as you flick back and forth between tabs.
WinZip has done the same trick.
They’ve over-complicated their simple apps, trying to be clever but missing the point.