The Mini Cooper is a great looking car. I want one. A yellow one, with a black top. I don’t care about the engine. I don’t care about how advanced the brake system is. If I never had to lift the bonnet my happiness would be complete.

    The yellow, cool thing

Most people who buy cars buy what they see on the outside. And why not? New cars don’t break down anymore - at least we don’t expect them to. So why should any of us be interested in what’s going on under the bonnet? If it looks cool, drives smoothly, and has really neat stuff on the dashboard, then it’s perfect.

Car makers have realised this, which is why the Mini Cooper is such a hot car. When are software designers going to get a clue?

Are we really interested in how slick the database structure is? Does it matter to anyone using a software product if the code base is fully modular and object oriented? And why are the dialogs all so grey and drab? - the Soviet Union lost the cold war. All that functional, boring, dullness is old hat now.

This is not dumbing down! We all like pretty things. Given the choice between pretty things that work well, and ugly things that seem to work no better, we want the pretty things. The designers of ugly things may try to convince us that their product is superior because of all the new technologies gone into the database, or the team of developers drafted in from NASA who built the engine, but the bottom line is: it’s still ugly.

Many of us spend hours every day sitting in front of the same computer, working with the same software packages. It may be a CRM system, a database or spreadsheet, or a simple word processor. Wouldn’t it be really great if these software systems looked and behaved as good on the outside as they claim to do on the inside?

Give us pretty icons, a clutter free workspace, an intuitive working environment, and please - stop blaming us when things go wrong! To use a tired old phrase commonly used in every context except this one by software designers: ‘It ain’t rocket science.’ Not even if your developers used to work for NASA.

My primary aim when designing PageFour was to make an attractive word processor that worked well. I wanted it to look cool, drive smoothly, and have really neat stuff on the dashboard. With version 1.2 only days away, I’m coming closer to achieving this.