Give me a KISS!

One of the things I feel passionately about is ease of use. I’m one of those guys that doesn’t normally read the documentation – the theory being that you should be able to intuitively use any product. Take Google’s Adwords product for example. I really hate to compare anything to Google by the way – everyone in the technology industry wants to compare just about anything to Google – then talk themselves out of doing anything because “Google are already doing that”. What a load of tripe – if that was the case nobody would ever start a company. Anyway, I digress. Google’s Adwords product was just about the easiest product I’ve ever used. When Adwords was first launched we managed to get an ad up in a couple of minutes that served hundreds of hits to our website. It was intuitive, clean and simple.

Pretty much everyone agrees that Google changed the game in online ads. Yet there was nothing innovative about online advertising. Yahoo and Microsoft had been doing it for years. Google though made it easy. I didn’t need to read a manual, I didn’t need customer support - quite simply it was the best product on the market.

Compare that to Overture. The interface was confusing, my anti-spyware blocked cookies that the product needed to log me in, it took days not minutes to get an ad up.

Speaking as a software vendor, we all need to spend more time on making this stuff easier. At WANdisco, we’re big boys and girls about this stuff and admit to ourselves where our product could and should be improved. Ease-of-deployment and ease-of –use are top of the agenda right now. Our product solves a terrifically complex problem; but we don’t want our users to see or deal with any of that complexity. It is a trap to assume that users have special skills – sure some do but they are usually early adopters. Einstein's maxim that "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" probably says it all.