1000 Flowers Bloom

Lesson about Simplicity

Joel on Software has a great post about how the Shutdown "feature" in Vista is ridiculous about providing way too many choices to the user for something that should be really straightforward. Moral of the story is to keep it simple!

Another very interesting post is by Moishe Lettvin who worked on the feature about how it got so compicated. The reason that it happened was an overly complicated decision making procedure that Moishe says had 43 people with some sort of voice in the decision. Again, keep it simple.

I think it's a fantastic example of how a bad decision making process leads to bad results.

What if you never had to register?

I've never been a big fan of registration. It was a topic we always struggled with when I was at Tribe. Do we need a confirmation email on registration?

Here's a fascinating post that Topix made about removing registration entirely from their comments. Net is that they increased volumes of commenters and dropped their bad posts rate.

Here's a summary of the philosophy that they say comes from a Japanese site called Ni-Chan:

   

Registration keeps out good posters. People with lives will tend to ignore forums with a registration process.    

Registration lets in bad posters. Children and Internet addicts tend to have free time to go register an account and check their e-mail for the confirmation message. They will generally make your forum a waste of bandwidth.    

Registration attracts trolls. If someone is interested in destroying a forum, a registration process only adds to the excitement of a challenge. Trolls are not out to protect their own reputation. They seek to destroy other peoples' "reputation”.    

Anonymity counters vanity. On a forum where registration is required, or even where people give themselves names, a clique is developed of the elite users, and posts deal as much with who you are as what you are posting. On an anonymous forum, if you can't tell who posts what, logic will overrule vanity.

Good stuff.

Microsoft redoes the iPod box

Ok this is freaking hysterical. Click on the video to watch it.

Change is Hard

Well I logged into my banking website today and everything had moved around on me. Menus had been changed, the wording was different - I was not a happy camper. I needed to pay a bill and I couldn't figure out how! Why did they do this to the site that I had known and loved?

I caught myself before I fired off a nasty email to the company.

This is the exact same behaviour that most users go through when you change a UI on them. I know this first hand from my time at Tribe. Even if the change is for the better and you have the testing data to prove it, some of your existing users are going to get disconcerted. Large change where the primary navigation is involved is incredibly hard on users. The flame mails that I used to get were testament to that.

It's funny but in it's easier to start over again with a fresh canvas and a new site than it is to change your existing one. It's much easier to let someone learn how to do something once than it is to make them break their habits to learn a new system.

Tribe is going to be going through a major UI change in the next month or so and even though I haven't seen it yet, I know that no matter how good it is and how much simpler it is for users that some people will be disoriented and confused. They will want things to stay the same. They will scream, shout and wail. I understand and sympathize with them.

I suppose that it's only fair that the shoe is now on the other foot. I'll give it a few weeks before I scream bloody murder.

Change is hard but things can't stay the same forever.

How to solve RSS usability

Robert Scoble has a great post about how terrible RSS Usability is.

I absolutely have to agree with him on this. I think that the problem is that the integration of RSS into our browsers is non existant. What should really happen is that whenever I hit a link that goes to and RSS feed that my browser should figure that out and ask me - what aggregator do I want to put that in?

Better yet - my browser should have an aggregator built in that keeps track of all this for me. I know tha there are browser based aggregator companies out there like Pluck. I will have to check it out more to see how well tha solves the problem.

Chris