Poser has all the earmarks of a developer designed interface. (Let's save some time here and just give it a TLA - y'know, a Three Letter Acronym. We'll call it DDI - Developer Designed Interface. I know something about this having been a developer once. Developers tend to design the interface from the perspective of their code, not from the perspective of the user. That's why you will find hair and outfits in the Character library, characters in the Pose library, and nothing (anymore) in the hair library. That's also why you will find the different parts of a bundled product scattered all over your Runtime - a morphing bed in the Characters library, but it's matching nightstand in the Props library, and the different color options for its sheets in Materials and/or Poses. This was not done this way out of consideration for the users, but because it fit into their coding structure. (I realize I'm making this bold statement without ever having seen the code, so I could be wrong. But probably not ;) )

The developer-centric perspective can also be seen in what SM chooses to put in their new releases. When P9 came out, the big selling point that SM was promoting was that it had Weight Mapping and Sub Surface Scattering, which prompted numerous threads asking, "What's Weight Mapping?", and "What's Sub Surface Scattering?" I've read my share of posts here and I don't ever recall seeing one that said, "Man, I sure wish Poser had some kind of Weight Mapping feature." However I have seen lots of threads that pleaded, in one way or another, for better usability. (To be fair, that could be due to my own sampling bias.)

I don’t mean to beat up on Poser or SM exclusively. None of this is uncommon in the high-tech world. These companies and the people who work for them are desperate not to fall behind the curve. Time spent on usability factors is time not spent on adding the latest bell and whistle, and this leads to the kind of elitist impatience that MarkR151 alluded to. From a developer's point of view, users keep asking the same questions over and over, and the developers don't understand why the users haven't figured it out by now.

The only way you’re going to see better usability is for the parent company or its investors to recognize that they are losing market share because users are migrating to more user friendly products, or that they are losing sales and/or upgrades because users are giving up entirely.

So, given all that, I suppose I should forward this little screed to SM., but first I’d like some feedback from the rest of you.

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OS: Windows 10 64-bit, Poser: 10