Free software scares normal people

You don't need two different versions of the software, one that is easy and one that is powerful. You can have one version that is both easy and powerful. Key concepts here are (1) progressive disclosure and (2) constraints.

See Don Norman's Design of Everyday things.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/progressive-disclosure/

https://www.nngroup.com/videos/positive-constraints-in-ux-wo...

It's easy to make the powerful version

It's a little harder to make an easy version

Making the progressive version is very difficult. Where you can please one audience with the powerful and easy versions, you can often disappoint both with the progressive version despite it taking much more effort.

In my personal experience, you're lucky if free software has the budget (time or money) to get to easy. There's very little free software that makes it to progressive.

this is the way

Relevant Steve Jobs quote: "Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."

So yes, it is hard to make the simple version. You have to have a very good understanding of what the user wants out of your product. Until you have this clarity, every feature seems important. Once you have this clarity you understand what the important features are. You make those features more prominent by giving them prime real estate, then tuck away the less important features in a less visible place. Simple things should be simple. Complex things only need to be possible.

Progressive disclosure can be intensely annoying to actual power users.

Definitionally, it means you're hiding (non-disclosing) features behind at least 1 secondary screen. Usually, it means hiding features behind several layers of disclosures.

Making a very simple product more powerful via progressive disclosure can be a good way to give more power to non-power users.

Making a powerful product "simpler" via progressive disclosure can annoy the hell out of power users who already use the product.

Just add an option for "advanced mode" that if clicked toggles to "basic mode". Power users are going to be looking for advanced features and only have to click it once. People who can barely read and are scared by anything advanced will get the interface they can use best the first time they open the app

It can get very complicated when you've built an audience where you have 10 segments that think their 10% of the use case is very important and you can only focus on a couple of segments at a time!

That would be even better. It would take longer than an evening, though.

>People who can barely read and are scared by anything advanced

I wonder who is responsible for the existence of such people.

> People who can barely read and are scared by anything advanced will get the interface they can use best the first time they open the app

It's certainly possible they can't read. But more likely they're perfectly intelligent and simply don't appreciate being forced to deal with unnecessary complexity to complete a simple task.

(Someone else's comment reminded me of the CHI video of Allen Newell and Ron Kaplan, two brilliant AI pioneers, struggling with a poorly-designed copy machine https://athinkingperson.com/2010/06/02/where-the-big-green-c...)