Compete StatsJohn Battelle posted an article near and dear to my heart entitled “The Power of Power Searchers“.

“What I do wonder is whether Google et al are creating products for ME, or for my mother. This data would argue that they should be for me.”

I’ve had many a heated discussion on what user segment a given product should be focused. At times, I think I’ve been right and I definitely know I’ve been wrong.

I’ve always been jaded/inspired by the Kai’s Power Tools approach. KPT had a stunning feature of awesomeness for power users. After you had applied KPT filters enough, you’d ‘earn’ more filters. These filters weren’t just greyed out, they were completely invisible to noobs. Most interestingly, I never saw the whole user apprenticeship model mentioned anywhere.

Of course, I never read manuals and it could have been featured prominently, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t based on the reactions of delight I heard from other users. It was sort of a secret society of the KPT Power Users. We made the Skull and Bones look like a bunch of gossipy fools. You’d see some crappy luminosity effect applied in someone’s Persuasion presentation and there’d be a few smug glances exchanged in the room, as if we were all thinking “Guess who just bought KPT!?”

Ok, so back to the point- KPT might have struck a balance but probably would’ve really alienated first time users deemed not worthy of some of the more interesting effects if it hadn’t been such a small segment of users and in a pre-blog era.

I’ve railed against adding wizards in one of my products because it was a sovereign application - I wasn’t going to punish the users who live day in and out in my app by burdening them with hand holding. That said, I wanted to ease the transition for the novice and make them productive ASAP.

The challenge with wizards and other performance support models is that you force the user to admit that he’s an idiot and I’ve yet to meet a user who feels he’s anything but absolutely and completely right. And they’re unanimous in that.

You can’t be everything to everybody. Don’t design apps for your Mom unless you’re chasing that lucrative ‘Mom’ market. Design for the segment that will gain the most utility from your application and also support your business/revenue needs. It’s pretty simple really.

Do I think Google missed the mark? Hmmmm, I don’t think that it is that simple. As someone pointed out in the comments of the Battelle article, power users do not click ads. Heck, I have enough Firefox extensions that obliterate ads  that I can’t remember the last time I saw a Google Ad. So taking my advice, they’re completely correct in not designing for me. I also can derive utility from Google -  the advanced page appeals to my need for 50 knobs to tweak. Where I do not  think they’ve done well in meeting my needs (and it is all about me) is in Google Apps. That said, they’ve made it pretty clear they’re not designing for me.

All right I give up — well done Google.