Mark Bernstein responds to Jakob "useit.com" Neilsen's typically conservative rant about web design comparing users to the "muggles" of Harry Potter's world.

Mark Bernstein: Dec0201 First, inconvenience and evil are not indistinguishable. Poor usability is chiefly a matter of inconvenience: making things take a little longer, making users take unnecessary steps. It's not nice, but there are worse things. Let's keep some perspective.

More substantially, conforming to 'expected behavior' is not the mark of a varied, rich, and sophisticated intellectual life. The urge to insist that expressive media conform to the imperatives of expectation and efficiency has had a sorry history in the past century or so. Usability is nice, but conformity is conformity.

Finally, to regard users as Muggles is, I think, fundamentally wrong. In fact, Rowling's "ethical" wizards are, if you take them seriously, mere cowards. Why do they hide magic from the Muggles? Yes, some Muggles are small-minded, mean, ignorant, and superstitious: does this relieve the ethical wizard from an obligation to treat muggles with decent respect? Where were the ethical Wizards in 1938-45? What are they doing about AIDS, global warming, hunger?

Bernstein is doing a lot of writing about putting the "architecture" back into "information architecture." Good stuff.