It's Hard Being Easy

I was talking to Justin recently, who had this idea for a great online business. It was great to him, of course. Basically, without giving away too much, he wanted a website so easy his mom could use it.

Now, I've always joked that there may be some technically literate mom's out there, so maybe Justin's mom would like to type her queries using lambda expressions. Justin, I'm sure, would assure me that his mom would fit into the plethora of users who find everything a mystery at a webpage.

And to be fair, this website she was using is already pretty easy, at least, for technical guys like me, meaning, it gives step-by-step directions, and such, and that's still too hard.

Justin figures he could make lots of money just by appealing to folks like his mom, who have money, but want things to be easy.

Reduce options!

But I think it's tough to be easy. The problem is that it's difficult to know just how little someone else knows. How smart should the program be to fill in for mistakes?

For many technophobes, the solution is to provide a high-level request to a real person, who figures out all the low-level details of what needs to happen.

I mean, a computer is pretty complex, if for no other reason than it's a huge repository of stuff. Files, programs, more files, more programs, directories, more directories.

If I had a solution, it would simply be to show a person how to do it. Pull up one of those YouTube like videos and go through the steps to do the task. People like seeing others do stuff for them. The real problem is when a person's likely to use the product once or twice, and so they need to spend the time to figure it out.

The key to developing these websites is the scientific principle. State your assumptions. ("Mom knows how to download photos to folders, and find them"). State what the person does or does not need to know. ("Knows what a hyperlink is", "Can't deal with busy screens"). Then, design, then test the design with real people (preferably, while you're not there).

Users wonder why some stuff is so complicated. The reason is developers are smart people but lazy. They pick a solution that's easy for them to write, even if it's hard to use. It takes lots of work to simplify, simplify, simplify. And yes, Justin's right about reducing choice. Present too many choices and people don't know what to do.

They wonder why certain choices are choices at all. For example, in my browser, I have "Character Encoding". For a naive user, this choice makes no sense at all. Of course, if you were Chinese wanting to read pages displayed in Chinese, this would be useful. But it makes no sense to most anyone else.

The lesson is simple. It's hard being easy.