Ian Mellett

I have a horrible confession to make.  Each morning, when I wake up, the first thing I nearly always do is.. read Twitter.  And Facebook, to a lesser degree, but nearly always Twitter.

This morning, I got a link to a blog called stuffthathappens.com, and the first thing I saw was this:

reproduced from stuffthathappens.com

Show that image to pretty much any software developer, and you’ll generally be greeted by a slightly guilty-looking grin.  The fact is that almost every developer has created something like that, where there’s a billion options scatter around the page, vaguely grouped together in sections that we hope make sense.

The real problem here is that, while it goes against common sense, is that simple is actually hard.  There’s probably a bunch of engineers at Google going “right, now we’ve got that search bar, we can add in a ‘number of searches’ button.  And we can display your current location, and just how many coffee shops are around the user, and then…”.  But that takes away from purpose, and then we either have to assume that the user has some inherent knowledge that they can take from the real world (buttons and switches turn things on and off, sliders increase or decrease ‘how much’), or that they can figure it out for themselves… somehow.

The only problem with the ‘somehow’ approach is that your users probably just won’t bother.