I’ve been having an argument with my sales monkey over trying to make Shockey Monkey simpler, particularly the accounting side of things. I’ve pretty much sunk all of his attempts to try to further dumb things down because of one clear concept:

There is no cure for stupidity.

Empowering idiots doesn’t make them smarter, it makes them needy and demanding.

For example, we have the simplest way to bill for cloud services in the industry.

We also have the full documentation for it here.

Every single process, step by step, on how to create, manage and even export to Quickbooks.

The problem? “When they click on the accounting screen they don’t know how to get started.”

Did they read the manual? “No, in this day and age nobody reads.”

Did they watch the video? “No, the video is too long.”

Well, tough #@%. We have a corporate responsibility to keep inept lazy people that can’t or won’t read documentation away from IT. Yes, I am all for making intuitive interfaces and live loading search results and eliminating popups and making people efficient.

Simplicity in software design does not and should not compensate for ignorance and laziness when it comes to documentation and training. Just as a child can’t open a bottle of Tylenol or start a chainsaw, neither should a piece of software be used without understanding the underlying business concepts.

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