Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

I have just come back from my yearly Christmas tour of visiting my mother in Sweden and my father in Finland. Doing what I do, I am always asked to look at one or the other computer related problem on my visits.
Suffice to say, it is a thoroughly humbling experience to help my mother or my father – their computer literacy is limited to say the least, but probably indicative of at least 50% of computer users. Sending and receiving e-mails is a big problem (biggest culprit in computing problems: Outlook, I always get Outlook related questions, most of them related to “send and receive”..), any website with more than rudimentary navigation and very simple forms are challenging to the degree that they are close to giving up.
To give a “for instance”: this summer when I was on holiday I received an empty e-mail from my dad, I knew instantly that if he bothered with trying to send me e-mail something important was going on, and just as I assumed, when I called him up it turned out that my 90 year old grandmother had been admitted to the hospital at the time (she is fine now and with as sharp a mind as ever, although of fragile health as you would expect of a 90-year old).

The point of these observations is that the flashy, feature rich “Web 2.0″ sites of the last years are for the most part too complex and too feature rich for a big subset of internet users, no matter what they say or claim about emphasis on “user friendliness”. If sending and receiving simple e-mails in Outlook or Gmail is hard work for a lot of Internet users, you can only begin to imagine what social networking, blogging or any number of other internet activities are to them: overwhelming and overcomplex (example: I’m sure my mother or father would love a service like Flickr - but Flickr in its current incarnation is just too complex for them to even remotely understand how to use).

This brings me to the value proposition of keeping things simple – not only in terms of what you, as a super user perceive as simple, but keeping things super simple. To make an analogy to my toys of choice from my childhood: the average reader of this blog is probably the computer and internet user equivalent of a Technic Lego enthusiast, but the fact remains that a big subset of users, my parents included are barely comfortable with the equivalent of Duplo Lego internet- and computing usage.

If you really want to make your software or website accessible to a large mass of internet users, it is probably worth putting extreme constraints on your product: cut out any feature or “user friendly” bells and whistles that are not absolutely essential for the use of it. Cut down choices and options to a bare minimum, so that most tasks can be executed in a straight linear fashion with a minimum of confusion.
If you don’t, the early adopters may like your product, but your mother and father most likely won’t.