Category: Design

Key Points

• More features equals more complexity
  • the more features you add, the less chance you have of coming across a new feature that is of real value to someone. Features will fall flat
  • building massive legacy of code that needs maintenance thereby increasing maintenance cost and slows down reaction to the market
  • users can’t easily find the features that are important to them. They also start resenting to pay for features they don’t use.
• Three perspectives when designing any piece of technology
  • The manager’s
  • The engineer’s
  • The user’s
• Simplicity
  • To feel in control
  • what feels simple to someone in one situation may not be true for everyone in every situation
  • Technology becomes interesting when it is catered for a wider audience than the experts
  • Prioritize features that satisfy mainstream user’s needs with minimal effort
  • People recognize and place value on the small differences
  • It does not mean want or poverty. It means anything foreign to it should be taken away
  • Watch out for fake simplicity –
    • a.k.a. I tried my best to explain it to you. If you don’t get it, its your own fault!
    • shifting responsibility for failure onto the user
    • most people don’t bother reading instructions, they prefer to get on with doing
  • when user needs to correct an error, it breaks his concentration and makes the experience feel complex
  • High Data Ink Ratio: don’t waste inks on anything that isn’t content or in repeating content
  • Simplify sentences
• Managing change within organization
  • Connecting change to the benefits
    • companies tend to measure success by making money and growing
    • need to understand how this piece works before attempting to simplify user experience
    • Simpler design = sell more cars or sell at higher price?
  • Prioritizing changes
    •  divide up a fixed number of points across all desired features
• Benchmarking the design
  • Write down a one-line description in the simple terms
  • Write down any guidelines I want to stick to
  • Watching people in the real world
• Audiences
  •  Types
    • Experts
      • make a lot of noise
      • wants a complex product, a.k.a. a rocket ship
      • might be best to ignore them
      • interested in customizing their settings
      • value precision of control
      • want perfect results
      • wants to take things apart to see how they work
      • wants an exact match
      • wants principals
    • Willing adopters
      • ok using fancy new features as long as we make them just a bit easier
      • will put up with a problem because they have learned to tolerate them
    • Mainstreamers
      • They use technology to get a job done now
      • value ease of control
      • want reliable results
      • afraid to break something
      • Vast majority of people are mainstreamers
      • wants a good match
      • wants examples and stories
      • only really care about a bicycle will get confused by complex products
      • Best to watch how they would use the product
      • If you want simplicity, and to be seen as innovative, you should aim to please this group
      • tend to forget what they learned when under pressure
  • Key insight
    • If you want to make something simple, design what mainstream audience wants and can do when under pressure
    • people don’t graduate from one group to another even after years of using a product they tend to stay in the same group
    • It has more to do with their underlying attitude towards technology than the amount of time spent using it
• Mainstreamer’s Emotional needs
  • achieve a lot
  • still feel in control  of the outcomes
  • don’t want to worry about the software or technology
• Capturing the experience in a story
  • describe the experience using the user’s language in a story
  • avoiding describing in too much details
  • A good user story is brief, concrete, credible and uses relevant details
  • Components
    • World
    • Character
    • Plot
  • Test your insight by spending more time watching people in the real world
  • Make sure to capture the correct vision
  • Understanding what’s core takes time
  • The really great person will keep on going… and come up with an elegant really beautiful solution that works
• The four strategies
  • remove
    • get rid of all unnecessary buttons
    • Do a few things far better than their rivals
      • Example: BaseCamp does a fraction of what Microsoft share point does but is described as addictively easy to use
    • Remove the clutter to focus on solving a few important problems really well
    • users can meet goals without distraction
    • don’t remove it because it is difficult to build!
    • watch out for sunk cost fallacy: do not avoid getting rid of them because they are already there
    • Watch out for What ifs – find out whether users really find the feature important
    • Identify user’s goals and set them in order of priority – focus solutions that completely meet users’ high priority goals before moving on to lower priority goals
  • organize
    • arrange the buttons into groups that make more sense
  • Hide
    • hide all but the most important buttons behind a hatch and only reveal it when absolutely necessary to do so
  • Displace
    • create a very simple remote control with a few basic features
    • control the rest via a menu on the TV screen

Further Readings

• Insanely great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed Everything, Steven Levy