It’s less of a theory and more of an observation. Muggles are buying dangerous lights, more and more often, so I’m looking for ways to address the complaints people have had.
Exactly. It’s happening quite a bit lately, so there has been a big increase in demand for “Anduril LITE” or other simplifications. I don’t want to ship items without the ability to do all the fun stuff though, so I’m looking for a way to do both.
It seems like the options are limited to only the following:
- Make a simple UI the only option.
- Manufacturer replaces the firmware with their own simple UI.
- Default to a simple UI, but include an option to enable more stuff if the user wants it.
- Limit sales to only a few enthusiast communities.
The first two have already happened a few times… because option 3 doesn’t exist and companies don’t like option 4 at all.
It’s not just safety though. People keep reporting that they feel overwhelmed and confused by all the features, and they want something which does less. Some are quite vocal about it, or even angry. So a few companies have already responded to this by making less-functional products, on purpose, to fill the demand.
Of course, at BLF we generally don’t want lights to do less. But maybe it’ll serve both crowds if it does less by default, but has an option so we can easily enable the full feature set.
There’s still a lot of communication to do first though, to make sure everyone’s needs are addressed and try to find agreeable solutions.
One thing I’m pretty sure of though… is that it’ll need to be renamed so it’s not called “muggle mode”. That’s arguably a bit insulting and makes it sound like something people should turn off immediately and never think about again. Instead, it might need to be something like “normal mode” and “advanced mode”. Or something which otherwise suggests that it’s okay to leave it in the default state if the user isn’t feeling adventurous.
Yeah, it could perhaps be Anduril2 or something. I don’t know; I’m terrible with names.