[alex_d]

"Where I'd disagree, however, is with the idea I infer (not imply -- pet peeve, sorry) from your statement, namely that it's therefore good to make things complicated 'cause it'll make us all smarter. I think life gets unavoidably complicated enough on its own these days without adding to it deliberately."

Of course. None of it is clear-cut as "harder is better". Having a lot of features without an interface that motivates you to use them doesn't help. You have to push the envelope on both the features and their organization with equal effort, creating an interface whose patterns and thought-out structure are as susceptible to being understood by intuition as they facilitate the very training of intuition. (I think it's that elegant kind of complexity which best trains the brain.) A designer, especially one who has the raw talent, just shouldn't be afraid (and Apple comes to mind).

Anyway.. about the Reader.

"See, now you're coming up with perfectly reasonable possible motivations for the decision!"

No, getting stuck with a bad design philosophy that hobbles your ability to add basic features is not a perfectly reasonable motivation. I mean I can't blame any individual person. The developers were doing what they were told by management, and the management perhaps didn't understand the challenges facing the developers or the solutions.

I think where our role should be, however, is not showing management what's the least subset of headaches they can get away with (the poll question), but trying to help them figure out how to integrate as much as possible in the best way. I guess I didn't approach the issue that way at first, but hopefully I got it right this time.

Indeed, that's what many people have already been thinking about.

To add to the discussion, I think a basic approach could be making the search interface look similar to how it usually appears in, say, Wordpad, Firefox, or Internet Explorer. Instead of clicking with the mouse, though, you tag each checkbox or button with a number. It'll look familiar, there is enough screen resolution to make it look good, and there's enough number keys. Maybe something more original might be better, but I think this is an improvement over a vertical-list-of-options approach (which will be unfamiliar and will lack most of the visual queues). Hitting the number associated with the text box can bring up a cellphone keypad for multitapping. Again not original, but familiar and tried and true. Just the way Sony likes it.