Consumer products vs professional products. Time the user is willing to invest in learning your interface. USS Enterprise was designer for people who would learn it for several years in star fleet academy. Airbnb is designed to become more clear and obvious than booking.com in two first minutes the user sees it.

The same user that might be routinely using software like Emacs or Ableton Live or Final Cut Pro or 3ds max studio or AutoCad in his professional life.

Beaucorp! What a great new word. One of the world-spanning megacorporations from William Gibson but decorated in a Beaux-Arts style.

It's an old word, afaik. Means 'mega' in this context. Also I mispelled it :D

I think they know that, and were riffing off the misspelling ;-)

It's about an 800 year old word in French. Wiktionary claims that it was imported to US English primarily by GIs returning from the Vietnam War. I'd assume that it would come more directly from French, in other forms of English.

I recall this being brought up by a guy who had been a helicopter mechanic in the Army... he believed it was a Vietnamese word spelled ‘buku’, and it took me some time to realize he meant beaucoup.

Example in context: “They’re making buku bucks over there.”

My father was in the Marine Corps; about a decade too young for Vietnam, but I kind of assume he picked it up from Marines who'd been in the service at the appropriate time.

From my perspective, for a long time it was just another one of those weird-sounding words that only Dad used (which turned out to be French, German, and Spanish).

I think the point is it's a beautiful misspelling.

Sadly, those space wasters apparently sell better on touch devices, which is why they’re so popular. Most designers also prefer them.

The alternative of information dense interfaces is generally prefered by hackers, which are accustomed to scary things like tables and lines of code that will make the average user run for the hills. We want magazine covers and picture books, not War and Peace.