A fantastic blog entry on 37Signals’ Signal vs. Noise explores the complexity of creating effective, simple user experiences:
Sometimes there’s a lot more to simple than meets the eye. To the customer, this is just a few obvious words in a small box. But really, that’s the point.
The sheer amount of work that can go into something as trivial as creating two lines of helper text is sometimes frightening. People who don’t do UI design typically look at the work I do and pooh-pooh it for “wasting huge amounts of time on a few measly pixels,” but ultimately it’s much more than that. Effective and clean user interfaces feel better to use, and make you far happier when you’re using them. They feel light and responsive, and (ideally) you might even forget that they’re there. That’s the ethos I think 37Signals has, and that never ceases to impress me.
1 response so far ↓
1 Will Pearson // Aug 27, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Yeah, simple is, well, kinda not simple, but simple can make all the difference in whether someone buys a product over a competitor’s product. J. Stacey Adams had it right when he wrote about equity and motivation. People are motivated based on value, which is the benefits they derive from something less the costs involved with gaining those benefits. Learning to use something is a cost and reducing it increases the value someone derives from something just as much as adding a new feature does. This notion of motivation based on value is not only applicable to whole products but also to individual features.
One reason why people seem not to value usability that much is the 80/20 rule. People tend to think that 80% of the users will use 20% of the features no matter what. I really dispute this idea, the only reason people don’t use more features is that they don’t derive enough value from using them to consider it worthwhile. The typical thinking is that a feature may not offer a user enough benefit to appeal to them. However, in these cases where the level of benefit is relatively low people will still use the feature if the cost of using that feature is lower than the level of benefit. Part of the reason for this emphasis on benefits is marketing, marketeers like to show off to people about what they are going to get.
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