Keep it simple: Why less is better than more
Computers shouldn’t be unusable. You don’t need to know how to work a telephone switch to make a phone call, or how to use the Hoover Dam to take a shower, or how to work a nuclear-power plant to turn on the lights. — Scott McNealy (via Usernomics)
Contrary to popular belief, one of the biggest challenges we face when developing an application isn’t deciding what features to put in. It’s what features not to put in.
At least once a month, we get some of our users together to play with the latest prototypes we’ve created. But guess what? Few of those actually make it out of the lab. And that’s a good thing, if we put every feature in, you’d need a user manual bigger than the phone book just to get started!
So why do we hold back on all those funky features? As Kathy Sierra puts it, we want to make sure you can kick ass without having to spend too long below the Suck Threshold. In other words, keeping it simple means you can have a fun, enjoyable experience right away.
Even if we liked complicated, whizzy things with lots and lots of buttons, it just wouldn’t make sense to attempt it on mobile. We want fast, easy-to-digest content when we’re on the move, right?
With this in mind, we still want to add the features you’re most interested in. Is it the ability to post your search results to Jaiku or to send them by SMS? What would make your experience more fun? We’re always listening and we will put the best ideas in place.
If you want to make a suggestion, you can…
- leave a comment right here on the blog
- pop your ideas in the feedback form (you’ll need to register first)
- or drop me an email at vero@taptu.com
What would the mobile search engine of YOUR dreams do? (Other than telepathically order the right flavour of ice cream just when you want it, of course. We’re working on that one.)
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March 12th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Which is least intimidating? Civil engineering or an iPod? Hmm.
MAC addresses are stratified by IP addresses. IP addresses are stratified by domain names. Domain names are stratified by search. But does it stop there?
Humans don’t have a part of their brain labelled “address bar” or “search box” (even in those quaint old phrenology skulls). Each of these approaches have emerged to mask the complexity of the layer beneath.
Humans will divine the easiest way to their goal. In the context of mobile web discovery, I believe the obvious goal is to go beyond textual search at all.
Jaiku? Twitter? SMS? These are cool tricks, but merely add syntactic extensions to the current search paradigm.
And voice-based search will surely be a great leap forward (and slightly easier than telepathy).
But no-one’s quite figured out what can be done with a combination of contextual variables (location + presence + state-of-mind + weather …) to create some sort of predictive discovery.
Please try to guess what I am looking for before I even open the browser.
Early evening? My friends have downloaded a certain artist’s warm-up track? Predict it for me too. After-hours, you see I’m headed home? Predict a down-tempo compilation similar to the one I listened to last Saturday.
You know it is raining, that I am outside and moving slowly, and that my next appointment is far away and soon? I shouldn’t even *have* to tell you that when I state “Taxi”, I mean neither the Scorcese film or the Vanessa Paradis track.
In fact, when I even open my phone, you should have a tel: link ready to go. Hell, why not even dial it for me. “Mr Pearce? Your cab, courtesy of Taptu”.
I guess none of this requires any technology not available today - but also I suspect this wasn’t quite what you had in mind