Conundrum: how to address the needs of both beginners and experts with a single interface.

Most users are intermediates.  Beginners quickly become intermediates (or give up).  Experts who don’t use a product frequently enough become intermediates.  Most people who use a program with some regularity are fluent with the subset of functions they commonly use, but not necessarily all the functionality the program offers (perpetual intermediates).

Programmers qualify as experts because they must explore every possible use case so they can create code to handle all situations.   Sales and marketing reps are continuously exposed to beginners, so they lobby for an interface that serves beginners.  Majority of real users (intermediates) don’t have anyone to lobby for them.

Appropriate goals:

• Rapidly and painlessly get beginners into intermediacy.
• Avoid putting obstacles in the way of intermediates who want to become experts.
• Keep perpetual intermediates happy.

• Designers should keep in mind that users are simultaneously very intelligent and very busy.
• People learn better when they understand cause and effect.  They need to understand why things work as they do.  Following the user’s mental model will make the interface more understandable.
• Extra help provided for beginners must not be fixed into the interface (they should quickly outgrow the need for such help, and then it will be just irritating)
• Overview information, such as a guided tour, is more important for beginners than reference information.
• Beginners will rely heavily on menus to learn and execute commands. Dialog boxes should be (tersely) explanatory, with convenient Cancel buttons.

• Access to esoteric features
• Fast access to regular working set of tools (shortcuts to almost everything)

• Easy access to tool.  Don’t need scope and purpose explained (already know).
• ToolTips help these users find tools.
• Online help should be geared toward intermediates.   The index is especially important.