The Paint Experience — August 6, 2008
I use Microsoft Paint occasionally. Its limited features and functionalities prevent Paint from competing with the industry acclaimed Adobe Photoshop. However this post is about an interesting observation I made on Microsoft Paint where Paint seems to be the preferred graphics editing programs amongst regular people.
When I say regular people, I meant to classify those who do not belong to the school of designers and related disciplines. The five top reasons why Paint is the choice of graphics editing program amongst the common can be stated as follows.
- Paint has an extremely simple user interface and strictly follows the desktop metaphor. Because of this, there is no way a user can go wrong with Paint. There is one window, one canvas and one toolbar to deal with. There is the pallet area too; but most users aren’t afraid of it as they are with other parts of a window.
- Paint starts fast: you don’t have to wait until the next epoch to use Paint. It has such a small footprint and will start before you are done doing a double-click. Another benefit of the small memory footprint is that you don’t need a fancy computer to run Paint on.
- You can only use the most common file types with Paint. Here again, you do something, and save the file in your format of choice without being presented a handful of post-save options. The file is just saved and ready to be used in a few milliseconds.
- You will never rip apart Paint by accident. Most modern software are designed with ‘total UI flexibility’ in mind so that there are 101 toolbars and menus to a density where people are scared to move the mouse pointer across the screen with the fear of moving one part of the UI and sticking it in another area rendering a total mess in the GUI. Paint doesn’t have this prevailing silliness and hence you are a happy user.
- You can buy a new computer and Paint will be there; you can go to a friend’s PC and still Paint will be there. Paint is ubiquitous; it’s installed by default on every computer since Windows 95. It’s totally available to you during the lifetime of your computer and will never expire asking you for a new serial number.
It seems like the main reason for regular people to like Paint is its simplicity. A normal user doesn’t fancy sophistication in software. They want their job done, in the easiest way and in the shortest timeframe.