I’m asked to test quite a bit of software and give feedback to the developers. Sometimes that goes well, others times, not so well.

To me, making an app simple to use — whether on the iPhone, iPad or Mac — doesn’t mean stripping out all of the features. All that does is make the app less useful for the user.

Rather, making an app simple to use is about hiding all of the complicated pieces of the app in a way that the user can get things done easily and quickly. That way features, and the end result of those features, seem almost magical.

Of course, apps like Photoshop and Pro Tools can’t do this for everything because we want that control, but in recent years, even these apps are including some of these types of features.