Ah yes forgot that artistes don’t appreciate small format screen experience. “I work on the big screen dammit…”
First reaction… OMG David Lynch has gotten old. Second reaction… spit take. I’m shocked he didn’t mention 1080p, oh wait that’s me.
B-Cubed recently posted about an Amazon screw-up with their recommendation engine where they failed to disambiguate the author Alan Cooper (of Cooper Design) with Alan Cooper who apparently writes about the history of war. Thus if you bought About Face you should buy Bravery Awards for Aerial Combat. Design is hell people. Apparently this recommendation engine affliction is both contagious and mutating.
Today I was doing some research and was poking around on the term “Hmaster” along with some other terms that I won’t mention for IP reasons. Anyhow Google suggested that I was likely really looking for “Hamster”. Ah no but it made me laugh anyhow. Especially at the thought that Google was recommending hamsters for my distributed processing. Hmmmn maybe they’re on to something.
PS before anyone comments, yeah I know more people search for “hamster” then “hmaster”. Or more correctly people change their “hmaster” search to “hamster”.
John 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.
37 Signals has a post today where they poo-poo personas
We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.
Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems. We recognize our problems aren’t unique. In fact, our problems are probably a lot like your problems. So we bundle up the solutions to our problems in the form of web-based software and offer them for sale.
So I buy in that you can/should build software that scratches an itch. I also can understand why it is powerful when it’s your itch but are they really saying we can only build software for ourselves? Note to self: good thing I consume a lot of RSS.
Seriously though, a lot of useful software would never have been built if this were the case. However, I suppose you could argue that there’s a lot of software built that shouldn’t have been.
I wonder what my former colleague Robert Barlow-Busch thinks. Bobby, what say ye?
