Your Product Will Never Be Simple Enough

In a recent article, David Pogue wrote that there is no core curriculum for people to understand technology. People often ask him "obvious" questions about technology that they never learned. That's probably why he wrote his missing manual series. We're all familiar with the problems of complex technology that we can never figure out but how can we fix this problem? One goal would be to make technology as easy as tying your shoes. Unfortunately, most of us can't even figure out how to do that right.

Even tying your shoes isn't as easy as it should be. At the TED conference in 2005 Terry Moore  gave a quick 3 minute talk on how to tie your shoes. After a pair of his shoes kept coming untied, he tried to return them. When he went to the store, the sales person said, "Hey, you're tying them wrong." This was a bit upsetting because at 50 he thought "If there's one thing that I thought I'd really nailed, it was how to tie my own shoes." The salesman proceeded to explain that most people tie the weak form of a shoelace knot (also called a granny knot) instead of tying the strong form of the knot (a slip knot). It's three minutes very well spent watching the video as your shoelaces will never become untied again. By the way, for a more thorough treatise on the topic take a look at Ian's Shoelace Site.

So if even shoelaces aren't idiot proof, how can we as product managers expect our customers to use our products correctly. Here are a few ideas:

1. Make the Primary Use Cases Super Clear: Twitter has many complicated features for power users (e.g., hash tags) that many newbies don't understand. But even the most naive user will pick up on the giant "What's Happening" window at the top of the screen. This design feature was so useful that Facebook quickly copied that design feature.
2. Allow Users To Come Up To Speed Easily: Microsoft Office is the king at this. First of all, Office has keyboard shortcuts. But a new user doesn't know how to use them. So if they want to copy something they go to Menu -> Edit -> Copy. Then they realize that you can also copy by pressing control-C -- it's right there next to the copy menu item. In Office 2007 they went much further by combining all of the features of menus and toolbars into a single "ribbon". This greatly increases the transparency of the program and brings features much closer to the user. It also provides pre-packaged uses of features (e.g., formatting a table in a pleasing way) that allows people to leverage the power of Office very easily. Then they can customize the features later. If you're interested, there's a great video on the ribbon with the user interface lead for Microsoft Office. 
3. Getting Started: Many companies post tutorials or how to lists. YouTube has a good example with their Creators Corner. It has everything that you need in order to create great YouTube videos including "inspiration". Though this site is quite complete, it's a bit overwhelming and takes a while to find. Probably the best way to get people to understand your product is through video. Google produces videos for many of their products like the Google Music cloud. Chase Blueprint does a great job of explaining a very complicated product in a way that makes sense to the everyday customer. These are essentially marketing videos that quickly take users through the primary use cases.  These can be low cost -- like Google does -- and still deliver a simple and clear message on how to use the product.
4. Tip Of The Day: Users want to be up and running as quickly as possible. But once they get the swing of things, they rarely look for additional features. One way to get users more engaged is to add a "tip of the day" so that every time the user uses the application or logs on to your website, the receive a new idea of how to use your product. Some tip providers like Windows Secrets even send a weekly update to subscribers. Though these lists are often for the primary software that customers use (e.g., Windows, Google Apps, etc.)
5. Take Advantage Of Rebellious Users: Customers don't always use your product as expected but that's a good thing! It's important to know that even if you've designed your product perfectly, power users will figure out interesting ways of using your product that you'd never imagined. UX Myths has a good list of products that were used in ways that were totally unexpected when they were designed. For example, Twitter moved from a site where people shared what they were doing to what they were thinking about. A classic case is Kleenex which started as a makeup remover and ended up with a very different use case!
6. FAQs: And of course, if all else fails have good FAQs. A well written FAQ is a really great thing. They were my favorite things on the internet before 1994 when Mosaic kick started the web revolution. And if you want to get really meta, there is a FAQ about FAQs.