many moons ago the first degree i started at university was architecture (you know, buildings). at the time "IT" professionals were in EDP or MIS departments, and spend many dull days fiddling about with COBOL code: not something i really wanted to do - for me computing was a hobby. as it turned out, architecture is one of those things you either need to be amazingly talented at (i wasn't, particularly) or have a great deal of life experience for (i certainly didn't) - otherwise you spend your working life spending many dull days fiddling about with window details or material schedules. so i quit & fell into IT as a systems operator.

however, all was not lost from those 3 years of studying architecture - it helped emphasise the importance of effective communication, including visual communication and the subconscious communication of interaction with the environment. this easily transfers into the computing world with the simple question:

is is easy to use?

the problem so far, unfortunately, is that there are many and varied definitions of the extremely subjective term "easy". trying to define it in a computing context to make everyone happy will almost certainly start a flamewar, no matter where the conversation is held. here's the start of my definition though:

are simple things simple to do?

in practice this means you should spend (considerably) less time setting something up than you spend enjoying the result; and if a someone understands the procedure for achieving result 'A', they should be able to understand or at least guess the procedure for achieving similar or related result 'B'.

what has this got to do with solaris? well - it would be disingenous to claim that solaris has targetted "regular" users up until recently. solaris 10 has made huge inroads into this however, with a modern GUI, built-in office productivity suite, and many other tools. it's also made huge leaps in performance and observability, which means there's an opportunity to have a major focus on how people approach using it.

i have my own ideas on what's important to look at, but i'd like to hear others. leave comments.