Make the tough stuff look simple

A year later, watching Forrest Gump in the cinema, I learnt that the character she had been working on was Lt. Dan Taylor and the shot was of him on a shrimping boat. In the film Lt. Dan loses his legs in Vietnam early in the story. As actor Gary Sinise has two complete legs they had to be lost digitally for the rest of the film. So effective was the removal, and so integral to the story, that the audience did not question it. For an encore ILM went on use Matador to insert Forrest Gump into historical footage of JFK, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

The special effects in Forrest Gump, like many of the very best, you simply don’t notice. They are so effective in supporting the story line and engaging you with the filmic experience, your attention is not distracted by them. And so it is with good technology products. All that clever technology, all those incredibly complex algorithms and details of what to do when – they are all best hidden.  In their place should be simplicity.

I like to think of the user interaction with a product as a story. There is a plot, the big thing the user is trying to achieve (and that’s “feed the family” not “drive the car to the supermarket”), and the user and product are characters in that story.  This gives you a way to tell the story to others (like engineers, designers, sales folks and management). You can tell the high-level story in just one or two sentences and it immediately gives the listener a framework to hang all the other details on.

As soon as you start to think of your user interaction in this way the detail gets really complex, really quickly, but you still have that simple structure and purpose to fall back on. Getting designers and engineers to think about what the user is trying to achieve in this way makes it obvious how simple the product is going to have to be if the user is going to remain focussed on their ultimate objective.

When faced with a difficult problem in the product about how it should act (perhaps when thinking of different circumstances under which a feature might be used), the favourite solutions is: “we’ll put in an option and then the user can decide which way they want it to work.” No! The user is concerned with whether there is enough cheese in the fridge to make lasagne, not whether the engine management system should switch from “performance” to “economy” modes.

So, come on. Think it through.  Figure out how to make the product support the user in their ultimate quest and hide all the techie details under the hood.

The use should be obvious, the design clean and the user benefits will flow.