Today I feel like remembering Tony Hoare's great sentence on software design, part of his 1980 Turing Award Lecture (published in Communications of the ACM 24 (2), (February 1981): pp. 75-83)

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

I learnt a lot when Greg and I did our study of web-based project management portals , specially when interviewing their creators.

Even if each interview took a lot of time (preparing the interview, transcribing and processing it,...), it was arguably the best source of information and by far the most interesting one since it gave us the opportunity to understand the rationale behind the tool design decisions and evolution.