Simplicity = fewer choices
In Choices = Headaches Joel Spolsky discusses the multitude of options a computer user must sort through to turn of their computer:
“The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel.”
and
“Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential.”
Of course Joel’s right, I did immediately think of many reasons why his simplification of the “Off button” complexity isn’t reasonable. And his reasoning still doesn’t convince me; I think he takes it too far, though some of the choices he eliminates are certainly redundant.
More telling to me, though, is how this reflects a tension between Cynthia and myself when she asks me for help with a computer task. Those conversations usually go something like this:
Cynthia: “How can I move this text I typed down to the bottom of this paragraph?”
Me: “Well, first you select it. Then you can press Ctrl+X, or go up to this menu here and choose Cut, or right-click on it and select Cut and then go to where you want it to be and press Ctrl+V, or right-click…”
Cynthia: “Never mind. I’ll just retype it.”
What Joel’s post has helped me to understand is that I just don’t understand enough about how Cyndi’s most comfortable using the keyboard and mouse to give the right answer for her. See, I want all of those options. I use them all at different times and if any one was absent, I’d miss it (not to mention just dragging the darn text to where you want it to be). But as she’s told me many times, Cyndi really just wants one way to do it. I struggle with that, but if I understood what the easiest mechanism for was, I could limit myself to explaining that way of doing things.
Back to Joel’s simplicity efforts, I wonder how far he’d really want to take it. Would he really want his word processor only to offer a single mechanism for saving a file, for example?
Currently listening to Vix 9 by Béla Fleck & The Flecktones from Three Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
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December 18th, 2006 at 8:54 am
Good post. My wife differs in that she doesn’t care which way; she just wishes I’d answer succinctly with only one of the options.