In January of this year, Alan Cooper was interviewed over at Info Queue:

I wrote a book called “About Face” in 1995 and I wrote a book called “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” in 1999 and both of these books were pluming this idea of how does software get constructed and how can it be designed well from the point of view of how it behaves in the world, as though it were a person with a social presence.

What I’m seeing more of these days is increasingly complex software with more verbose labeling and explanatory passages.  It’s not surprising given Cooper’s impact on design and that others like Luke Wroblewski in Web Form Design suggest something similar:

• Think about how a form can be organized as a conversation instead of an interrogation.
• Clear, conversational language can clear up potential ambiguity.

Take the advanced administrative interface for Netgear’s ReadyNAS Duo network storage device.

Previous iterations of interfaces like these would have made do with the terse, less expository text adjancent the combo box.  With the conversational tone and actionable quality of the additional text, boneheads like myself have all the information they need to know whether or not to enable this feature.  For interfaces like this used once in a blue moon, learning is irrelevant.  Infrequent use means that you re-learn the entire thing from scratch each time you use it and this text is a life saver.

What’s great about Netgear’s decision to bold the label is that advanced users can happily scan on by without reading the additional text.  I’m pleasantly surprised by this level of sophistication from a network hardware company.