The perils of making things easy

I love my new Nokia N73 and it is a big advance on the N70 apart from one real niggle. They have introduced a button on the side of the phone that jumps you straight to your image gallery. Trouble is I keep pressing that button by mistake when I pick the phone up and it introduces a frustrating delay while I clear the screen and get back to what I wanted to do. Someone thought this was making things easier - it hasn't.

While taking part in a meeting about a client's intranet design one group kept re-iterating that it had to be kept simple. Trouble is simple meant prioritizing the things that they thought were important which would almost certainly make it harder for everyone else.

I recently saw a screen grab of modifications that have been made to the BBC's intranet wiki since I left. Presumably this was again done to make things easy but making a wiki look like a web page doesn't make it easy, it makes it confusing, and I spent a good five minutes staring at the page trying to work out what the various bits were or did.

Expecting people to make a little bit of effort isn't always a bad thing!

Comments

[MLO]

This is a common problem with all design. Most people THINK they understand good usability, but even the best usability people tend to get stuck into one or two paradigms.

As someone who has implemented user systems for consumers, techies, managers, call centers, etc. I can tell you that what is simple for one is complicated for another group. A design that is perfect for a consumer will cause a lack of productivity for call center personnel.

The same is true with format. One of the more effective ways I have communicated this in the past has been to take the print media forms: Books, Graphic Novels, Newspapers, Periodicals. They have similar platforms, but each has different features that are specific to their form. Even within this, a popular magazine is not going to use a format that a scholarly journal would even though it may present similar information.

Effective information design is hard. There are things that wiki does well, but there are a lot of things about it that are too complicated for the "average" user. (Not computer savvy.) At least when implemented by the average technical team.

Pax,

MLO