Simplicity in Online UI
I was reading this insightful post on FranticIndustries about making things simple on your website. To me, this is a huge design issue, your website and UI have to be very friendly to the end user. It can be very difficult to accomplish, though, because many sites provide a lot of complex functionality. However, whenever possible that complexity should be hidden from the user.
As an example, look at the rating systems on Amazon vs Slashdot’s comment rating. On Amazon you give something a rating from 1 to 5 and that’s it. On Slashdot there’s some system with Karma and meta this and meta that, you need to already have a deep understanding to figure out how to do something on Slashdot. Because of its self selected audience it can get away with this and it works, but that would never fly on a general audience site. But Amazon’s system does a lot of work behind the scenes to figure out which votes are important, whether or not you are trying to game the system by getting your friends to rate things consistently, etc.. They accomplish the same goals in the end but Amazon conceals all this effort from the end user and so the interface is kept incredibly intuitive and easy to use.
A lot of the new Web2.0 sites today understand this and do one thing and do it well. Basically they give you one button and make that button really bi and that’s a great user interface. Removing barriers between the user and their goal is key to the success of any site. It may be difficult to do and some sites are truly complex and no amount of UI work will make them instantly obvious to the average user, as long as they understand who their target audience is, that works too.
The iPod’s weren’t successful just because they were pretty and white. Their design encompassed a dead simple ui. A scroll wheel and a couple buttons - a huge departure from the button and menu laden players that nobody was buying before the iPod came along. Palm Treo people look at the iPhone and see it’s sleek design and it’s targetting to a mass culture and see it as a toy. They don’t seem to grasp that it’s targetted at everyone because it’s redesigned the ui so that everyone can use it w/out any seeming loss in functionality. We’ll see it it lives up to the hype - I sincerely hope it does because the smartphone industry needs a big kick in the pants.
So keeping with my all design weekend, this is an incredibly important facet of the design of a website or any application, really. Design isn’t just about pretty headlines and graphics, it’s an integral part of the function of the application and something that I believe a lot of people don’t fully appreciate.
