[…] This is where our traditional GUI with buttons, windows, sliders, check boxes and visual boxes improved user experience. However it also has a downside. GUI dumbs down the user experience. If the UI designer did not create a button for it, then there is no easy way to do it. The design is crucial, and things like button and menu layout affect user experience. If you hide some functionality under nested sub-menus and give it a cryptic name, most users will never find it. So GUI is not a perfect interface. Not by a long shot. But it is much more intuitive than CLI. […]

Exactly – people just don’t want to learn these things.

It’s kinda sad to think about it, but large percentage of population can’t even be bothered to figure out how to make the clock on their VCR to stop blinking 12.

Being a UNIX sysadmin . . . I feel your pain!

I have a few users with Phds that can barely operate solitaire. They see me come in and use the CLI to fix things and ask, “How did you do that? Can I do that to?” I get extremely frustrated trying to teach them and end up writting something up in PerlTK just so they don’t screw it up.

I don’t think users are stupid as much as they are just lazy and don’t want to learn. They think they are above using the computer that way. I agree with your statement that they just expect the GUI to do the automation for them.

In the early days, all computer users had some experience with programming, so there was a little bit of background on how computers work. That little bit of knowledge is no longer shared among the user community.

The K.I.S.S. principle in fact :)
Keep It Stupid Simple

I myself am a programmer (Flex, for the interested)
and i sometimes need to make a GUI
these are very simple, sometimes i’m even told to move a simple button a bit higher so “the user finds it more easilyer”

I hope, in the future, that there will be more sorts of GUI’s for Windows, like now in Linux
so you can choose one according to your click game skills :P

you make a very valid point. briefly rethink your anti-bluej arguments and tell me if you are now even more anti object first teaching.

imagine what the next big thing that’ll get dumbed down is?