Yup, ultimately the balance between simplicity and technical operations available will depend on one’s own specific use case.
That said, for technical applications, I think it makes sense to expose as much of your features as possible in terms of composable, atomic units and operations.
If Cmd-Z maps to a black box “undo” command, then anything on top of that will seem like it comes at an interface complexity cost.
If, however, Cmd-Z is a configurable shortcut like any other that, by default, happens to send a “undo 1 user operation” message to a “history” module, that’s a different story. Now your users can modify it to be “undo one high level operation” instead, or “undo all consecutive operations that are the same in kind”. Or perhaps they want Cmd-Z to undo the last discrete operation, and Cmd-Alt-Z to undo the last logical operation. Or maybe there’s a strong temporal dimension to their work and they want the undo logic to take that into account.
Likely not the kind of thing you’d want for a mobile photo sharing app meant for a wide audience; but maybe the kind of thing you’d want for a complex, specialized data processing tool on the desktop.
That said, for technical applications, I think it makes sense to expose as much of your features as possible in terms of composable, atomic units and operations.
If Cmd-Z maps to a black box “undo” command, then anything on top of that will seem like it comes at an interface complexity cost.
If, however, Cmd-Z is a configurable shortcut like any other that, by default, happens to send a “undo 1 user operation” message to a “history” module, that’s a different story. Now your users can modify it to be “undo one high level operation” instead, or “undo all consecutive operations that are the same in kind”. Or perhaps they want Cmd-Z to undo the last discrete operation, and Cmd-Alt-Z to undo the last logical operation. Or maybe there’s a strong temporal dimension to their work and they want the undo logic to take that into account.
Likely not the kind of thing you’d want for a mobile photo sharing app meant for a wide audience; but maybe the kind of thing you’d want for a complex, specialized data processing tool on the desktop.