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Friday, April 16th, 2010
The learning curve - understanding the relationship between power and simplicityBy Tyler King
If you're a regular reader, you know that I love simple software. Most of the time when people hear the word "simple", they assume a lack of sophistication and power, but that doesn't have to be the case. I'm not going to be able to tackle this entire issue in one blog post, but I want to introduce one way software can attempt to bridge the gap between power and simplicity.
It seems like everyone assumes that the more simple a product gets, the less it's capable of. The more powerful, the harder it is to use. For example, people like the fact that Twitter has the 140 character limit because it keeps things simple. Similarly, people accept Photoshop's complexity because it's capable of accomplishing so much.
If there has to be a trade-off between power and simplicity, I'll take the side of simplicity every time. The thing is, there isn't a linear relationship between the two. Some software is powerful and simple (Mint, Tumblr, Dropbox), while some software is neither (Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Outlook, almost anything made by Intuit).
So how can software be the best of both worlds? I think there are two basic ways to blend simplicity and power. First, having truly inspired user interface design always helps. When you use Mint.com, you can just tell that they have a brilliant designer. Unfortunately, that's pretty rare and it's nearly impossible to quantify so I won't spend any more time on that.
The more tangible way software can be both simple and powerful is for the designers to understand and embrace the learning curve. What I mean is that the initial user experience can be very simple because the user isn't aware of some of the advanced features, but the software educates them as they use it. Here's an example of how Google Wave tries to educate users:
This example isn't particularly subtle, but I think it gets the point across. There's a "Done" button which makes sense to beginning users. After clicking on the button a few times, most people will remember that hitting "Shift+enter" gets the job done so they won't need to scroll to the bottom of the page to click on the button anymore.
So to summarize, software can have a learning curve which means that users might not understand all the powerful features at first, but they will over time. It's important that the initial experience makes sense to users or else they'll never bother to learn the good stuff. Also, the user has to intuitively learn from experience. If people have to read a users manual or do research online, the learning curve is too high and most people will abandon the software.
As we continue to review software in the future, we'll often discuss the learning curve. What is the software like the first time you use it, what is the software like after you've mastered it, and how long does it take to get to that point?
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