When I started my company with a friend two years ago, I had many plans for it and myself. One of them was to make interesting, innovative stuff. Hard problems others weren’t tackling or we thought we could do better.

A year and a half ago we started to work on what is slowly, but clearly becoming Marela (which should see light of the day this autumn). It’s interesting how you start working on one clear idea and with each week that passes, your idea and your view change a bit until after a while, they are very much different from what you set out to do. Same passions, same goals, but quite a different result.

What really changed in last year is what I personally want to do. I’d still like to do things that nobody has done yet, but more important now is to take ideas from others and try to make them more accessible, easier to comprehend and use. I’ve noticed that most of my innovating these days, as much as it happens, is directed toward these goals.

Lately I’ve been having awful time using stuff made by Apple. Ipod refuses to wake up from sleep without reboot, Powerbook added broken Superdrive to random freezes and new iMac seems to find ever new ways to annoy me. So I’ve spent a good amount of time last week to recover pictures from last vacation and fix other random iPhoto quirks and while I was doing that, a wonderful thing happened.

Something shifted in my head and for a while I could see clearly how computers look to people, who unlike me haven’t spent a better part of two decades behind a keyboard, but use them with the same understanding and confidence as I can use lathe.

God, it’s awful how much crap we produced and still produce. I’ve never seen so much wisdom in Jacob Nielsen’s words as in those moments. Gray backgrounds with blue links and black text might be dull, but you certainly don’t have to guess a lot on what to click after you’ve seen one such page.

Luckily the insight isn’t completely gone, but I wish I’d keep more of it. I’m not saying we should abandon everything and return to bleak past, especially since the problem is self correcting one, but I do feel impelled to make my work more accessible to more people.

In a way, I think there’s a dilemma of who you want to reach. I believe younger generations don’t and won’t have problems with most of the things designers and programmers come up since computers and technology have always been a large part of their lives. However, in general, it’s a bigger problem for those, who haven’t picked up idioms of computer user interfaces young enough.

Personally, I think making things easier for later makes it easier for former too and therefore a reasonable goal to pursue.