Fewer Knobs, More Smarts

Posted by Kunal Mahajan on 28 Mar 2010

As technologists, we often get the urge to provide every possible knob a user could ever want. We feel we ought to give users more control over stuff. The problem, of course, is that most users are not engineers like us and aren't trained to think like that.

 

A better approach is generally to reduce the number of settings, user-controlled functions, parameters, buttons, links, clicks, etc. I call these knobs. Apple has done a great job doing this. Microsoft is still learning.

 

For example, in Internet Explorer, when users try closing the browser while multiple tabs are open, the system asks whether you're completely sure you want to close all tabs. Obviously, the project manager designing the app must have thought it was the right thing to do to check in with the user. I recently began using Chrome and realized how painful it had been to click one more button after I have let IE know that I wanted to close my browser. Now I'm sure that somewhere among the settings and options, IE has an option of suppressing that particular function. Along the same lines, we engineers have go to to learn to suppress our innate desire to provide endless configurations and options.

 

I remember designing privacy settings for inCampus.com. We wanted to be certain that users could control whether they want to share their phone number with their friends. We provided a comprehensive matrix of security settings, which from an engineering point of view, was an marvel to behold:

 

 

From a usability point of view, however, I don’t know that a single user ever actually figured it out and put it to use. In hindsight, we could have provided simple settings such as:

 

Totally private (no one sees anything)

Buddies and campus mates can see stuff about me

It's all public

 

 

Users are busy people. Sites these days are lucky to get a few minutes' focussed attention from visitors. A three-minute stay on a site is considered a tremendous accomplishment. When identifying and designing a feature, ask yourself what portion of those three minutes it's going to take to figure that feature out and actually get something out of it. If it takes five minutes, you'll be very lucky to get your site bookmarked with a thought of one day, perhaps, returning for another visit. I have a whole closet full of bookmarks I've never revisited. I took a look at a few today as I cleaned up my laptop and found some really amazing sites there.

 

More Smarts

When designing your site, build more smarts into it. For a video messaging site, automatically detect the user's connection speed and determine the video quality being recorded and uploaded. If you feel compelled to tell the user what an intelligent system you've designed, give a tiny link somewhere at the bottom explaining the brilliant process you've created. But make it seamless for the user.

 

The most important question you should ask yourself is this: of all the sites out there delivering the products, services, features and functions my site delivers, what's going to set me apart? The answer is simple. Clicks and strokes. Count the number of click and strokes it takes your site to do that thing everybody is else is doing. The site with the fewest clicks and strokes wins.

 

In a world of online abundance, less is nearly always more.