Relentless Simplicity :: The Bonanzle Tech Blog

There are a couple books (literally, two) that I find myself quoting from on a very regular basis. Today, I come to speak of the book that takes about an hour to read and years to fully assimilate.

But before I reveal the identity of this book, a question: when was the last time you started using a new application (for the sake of this blog, “applications” includes web sites) and felt like the architect of said application truly cared about your experience?

Speaking from personal experience, it never occurred to me why certain applications felt “better” and “worse” to use. Nor did I ask myself why frustrating applications had ended up being designed as they were. Now I reflect on both regularly, and the reason is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

Before I go any further, I should probably throw in fair warning: after reading this book, my reaction to using poorly designed software has changed from a mix of frustration and confusion to simple anger. If I waste more than five minutes finding a basic piece of functionality in an application, this now generally leads to severe annoyance. There is a fair chance that you, too, will revile the authors of your poorly designed software after reading this book. Therefore, if you are a person of action with a strong sense of justice, think twice before reading a text this potent.

But if you think you can deal with the truth, here’s what you’ll learn:

The premise of the book centers around the fact that users are very busy people who have neither the time nor the will to give an application as much attention as designers think they will. Krug asserts that when encountering a new application, the human impulse is to scan a page in about 1-3 seconds, make a best guess what will get them where they want to go (in Krug’s words, “satisfice”), and muddle along from there. He points out that designers should take care not to waste users’ milliseconds through making unclear links or leave them stranded in an application without a clear sense of where they are. He goes on to do some exercises where the reader sees examples of well-organized sites (i.e., Amazon) and poorly organized sites (buy the book and see them).

What’s more, the book is chock full of pictures and great examples. As I’ve come to know other Internet entrepreneurs within the community, I have found myself repeatedly citing examples in this book, as it seems to take most applications at least an iteration or two before they can get enough user feedback to create a UI layout that makes sense. Without this book and a strong sense of responsibility to your user, an application can quite easily never get things right.

With this book explained, you can now look forward to hearing the exasperated tales of applications that drive me bonkers, like TopStyle. This application earned itself an express ticket to my bad side today when, after handily reporting files with CSS errors in them, it provides no clear path of how to fix (or even view) these errors. Clicking on a specific error in a list of errors just jumps directly to the top of the file that the error resides in, not to the error itself. Brilliant.

Bill Design, Rants, Technology, Tough Decisions, User Experience

It takes a lot of courage to acknowledge how screwed up you are, eBay.  I applaud you.  But one problem:  the same way that AltaVista couldn’t be a search engine and a content portal and an everything-else, neither can eBay effectively be a collector’s site and an online store hoster and an average Joe’s auction source (amongst about 1000 other things that eBay currently “is”).  Complexity is inherently part of their scope, and I’m not sure that adding a social networking layer and mobile apps is the solution to that.

If eBay is trying to figure out what happened to the wind in its sales (sic), they might want to take a look at the Etsy and edgeio traffic growth over the last year.  Those several hundred percent growth rates are being reaped by sites that understand how to do one thing really well, rather than doing everything mostly OK.

I’ll be frank here that sometimes I wonder whether being in the same market as the Internet’s fourth-largest site was a good choice for my first true, large-scale business.  I have to think that there are businesses out there that don’t have to constantly look over their shoulder at what is being done by the several-billion-dollar behemoth.  But at the same time, we are jabbing a target so large that it takes years to swing back, if it even notices it was hit.  For those that get to help build our alpha into a beta version starting next month, you will see a creative market opportunity that wedges between the cracks a giant can’t fit into.

Bill Competition, Design, User Experience

We are now collecting email addresses of those who’d like to help give feedback on the design of the site. We will probably begin our formal user testing in about a month, but I’d like to start rounding up participants now so that we can get as much feedback as possible once we’re ready to begin testing.

I’ve created an email address form on the main Bonanzle entry page that you can use to sign up if you’re interested.

I’m thinking that the user testing will probably consist of us watching you try to post and search for simulated items on the site. Coffee and appreciation will be included free of charge, maybe even lunch, money, or the gift of eternal life, as circumstances dictate.

Bill Progress, User Experience

Myself and a bunch of friends are going to jump from a plane in a couple weeks. I have mixed feelings about how much I’ll enjoy it. The safety statistics don’t concern me much, nor does the thought of jumping from the plane particularly make me sweat. The part of the trip I am most dreading is the many hours that we will have to sit around the wherever-you-sit-at-a-skydiving-joint and think Think think about all the tiny logistics of what we’re about to do. The same unending stream of thoughts that makes my brain so very useful for discovering creative solutions/solving deep-rooted problems isn’t discriminating about what it will analyze; therefore I’m probably destined for some miserable hours. It is one thing to go from hanging out and drinking beers to jumping 14,000 feet. It’s another to sit around with little diversion for hours and ponder how someone could hit the wing.

I’m thinking the skydiving experience will most likely prove to be another everyday example of preventable customer discomfort. I believe that these discomforts exist in large part because, often times, customers do not even realize their discomfort is preventable. The example on Creating Passionate Users of two potential dentists’ offices comes to mind. One dentist office looks more or less like every dentist office I have ever been to: dry, clinical, and, um, black & white. The other one is dressed in warm colors, “smells like cookies,” and has a wine bar. Every time I have gone to my dentists’ since seeing this graphic, I think to myself, “Where’s the damn wine?” Every time I sit in the seat, stare toward the ceiling, and listen to the sweet lullabys of the dental drill, I think, “Where’s the plasma TV with ESPN or Xbox 360 or anything?”

Simply put, service providers have a tremendous opportunity to see past conventions and create an experience that makes the customer happy from the moment they enter to the moment they leave. The service itself is but one aspect of the experience. In many cases, the service itself might take only a small portion of the overall time for the experience (how many times have I sat 20 minutes or more in an empty patient room at a doctor’s office, waiting for a doctor that spent five minutes with me before rendering their verdict?). And the service is frequently not what’s on the customer’s mind during most of the experience.

It is the experience that I remember, and it is the experience that I think about when considering whether I’d go back.

Bill Rants, User Experience