Yostivanich

There is a series of dis­cus­sions that occurs every year where a 1,000 peo­ple are invited to dis­cuss ideas in Tech­nol­ogy, Enter­tain­ment, and Design or TED. The peo­ple who are invited to this round­house of dis­cus­sions are sim­ply some of the most intel­li­gent, out­spo­ken, mav­er­ick and iconic peo­ple that exist. To be invited to even attend the con­fer­ence alone is an honor that many peo­ple would love to have, to speak at one of these events is an even more pres­ti­gious honor. TED has never been broad­cast to the pub­lic, the talks that were given were always reserved for those 1,000 peo­ple who attended that year. How­ever this year, approx­i­mately 2 or 3 months ago the talks were and still are slowly being released to the public.

This is won­der­ful, because I feel that all knowl­edge should be released to the pub­lic. (I’ll prob­a­bly blog more about this on a later date.) The TED talks cover so many dif­fer­ent degrees and back­grounds that they are really fas­ci­nat­ing to any­one no mat­ter what you are inter­ested in. This is going to be the first in many posts dis­cussing sev­eral dif­fer­ent TED talks that I will post from time to time.

My first post in this series is going to cover David Pogue’s TED talk in 2006 dis­cussing the state of soft­ware and tech­nol­ogy in gen­eral from the point of view of the user. David Pogue’s basic theme is sim­plic­ity sells, not only does it sell but it sells won­der­fully. More and more com­pa­nies seem to travel away from this idea espe­cially for soft­ware com­pa­nies. Yes, I would hon­estly say that there are fea­tures that are needed and more fea­tures is not nec­es­sar­ily right off hand a bad idea inher­ently. The idea is not so much adding in too many fea­tures, rather it is mak­ing those fea­tures easy to use, and easy to access. There are so many exam­ples of prod­ucts that fea­ture overkill it would be ridicu­lous to list all of them. All of you can think of a prod­uct that had more fea­tures than you knew what to do with, the eas­i­est exam­ple is Microsoft’s Office Word. A great prod­uct in the sense that it works, it is pow­er­ful, it allows you to write many dif­fer­ent types of doc­u­ments and to do so much edit­ing and pol­ish to a doc­u­ment it is ridiculous.

That is the prob­lem, it is ridicu­lous. Have you ever opened up all of the tool bars in Word and seen just how many there are? Just for ref­er­ence you elim­i­nate pretty close to 50% of the screen with tool bars. How often have you ever wanted to edit or write Visual Basic in a Word doc­u­ment, prob­a­bly not all that often, but you can. Or has any­one ever sent an e-mail through Out­look using Word. Peo­ple that I know who use both pro­grams on a daily basis do not use this tool, why? Sim­ple, it’s eas­ier to use the tool that was designed for e-mails, Out­look. Speak­ing of Out­look the cal­en­dar that is inte­grated with it is great, but how do I make an exportable cal­en­dar that still retains some secu­rity fea­tures on it? I know you can do it, but I once spent 2 hours try­ing to find out how to do before I said for­get it and instead used a dif­fer­ent tool that I was actu­ally able to find out how to export a cal­en­dar with secu­rity fea­tures in the calendar.

Sim­plic­ity isn’t a crazy idea that is hard to dis­cover, it is how­ever an idea hard for any hard core geek which is 99% of the peo­ple design­ing and decid­ing what the next iter­a­tion of a pro­gram will be to move away from more fea­tures. I do not want to say that extra fea­tures are wrong and that when a pro­gram is released that they should not put in any extra fea­tures. But, and this is key, fea­tures must be inte­grated intel­li­gently. Not only should they be easy to use, find, and manip­u­late but they should also be use­ful. If a poll was taken how many peo­ple even know about the VB tool bar in Word, then how many fewer peo­ple actu­ally use it, per­haps even more telling would be how many peo­ple used it on any­thing approach­ing a monthly basis. I wouldn’t mind see­ing the num­bers on that.

A tool should be designed to help the user not hin­der them. When tools keep pil­ing on top of each other, that is a hin­drance. Design sim­plic­ity into your prod­ucts and watch how more peo­ple not only will use your prod­uct but will also use more fea­tures and rec­om­mend other peo­ple use it as well. For instance YouTube, is sim­plic­ity in action. Unlike many other video shar­ing sites which require the file to be trans-coded into a cer­tain type before they will accept it, YouTube accepts all files and does the trans-coding them­selves. This is impor­tant because for the major­ity of peo­ple in the world, trans-coding sounds like voodoo. YouTube, just works, because of this it is used and peo­ple rec­om­mend it to other peo­ple. Most peo­ple don’t even know what a file name exten­sion is much less how to change a file from one type to another. YouTube hides this impor­tant and nec­es­sary step from the user and because of this the process of upload­ing a movie to the Inter­net becomes painless.

You must always aggre­gate your program/product to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor what­ever and who­ever that may be. The less steps involved, the clearer the steps, the more user friendly the pro­gram, the bet­ter the user expe­ri­ence will be and that ulti­mately that is what will gen­er­ate sales and acco­lades, not the num­ber of fea­tures built into the program.