A couple of disparate events have gotten me thinking about the user interface for collaboration/social media sites and the question of whether a UI can be so intuitive or self-documenting that formal instruction is not needed.
I'm a relatively recent Facebook user. While I love what the site does I find it the most confusing and random selection of screens and tools out there. There doesn't seem to be much organizing logic to know where to find what. The overall sense of bewilderment is certainly enhanced by the site's slow updates so sometimes you think something's not where you expect it but in fact it just hasn't refreshed yet. I see some of the same issues, although not to the same extent, on LinkedIn.
What's going on here? Huge numbers of people use these sites voluntarily. There is no instruction offered or expected. Folks muddle through. Perhaps it's an age thing. Do younger users have more of a feel for how these sites work, or perhaps just more tolerance for unexpected behavior on a web site?
The same issues apply with corporate collaboration tools.
A professional at a company I support recently wanted a file sharing tool for use on a project with his client. Since the company used IBM Lotus Quickr for internal file sharing I set up a simple Quickr place for him. I set the Library as the home page for the place and hid the extraneous features as much as the standard place designs allow. Here's what it looks like:
His reaction was that he couldn't use that with his clients; it was too confusing and hard to use. He ended up going with another tool (inteRoom from Mayopi) that offered fewer features because he felt it was easier. The solution he used is shown below.
Is the second example, while attractive, really any easier to use? Enough so that it's worth giving up functionality and storing data outside the firm's KM solution? Is either one harder than Google Docs which, like Facebook, is expected to be intuitive and self-documenting?
What is the proper expectation when rolling out web-based collaboration tools? Do we assume the end user can use sites like Google Docs? Do we need to pre-qualify the users and provide instruction in some cases? What makes a web tool easy to use? Is it the same for everyone?
A theory I've relied on for many years is that the folks who design computerized tools are not the best ones to decide what's intuitive or logical for a non-technical business user. That applies to word processing, file navigation (e.g. Windows Explorer) or web sites. I'm frequently told by non-technical folks that one program or site is easier to use than another. I look at them and can't detect a difference. The end-user perspective is the one that counts, but is there a way to predict what that will be for any particular group of users? Microsoft spends huge amounts of time and money on usability testing and yet whenever they make a UI change it's almost always criticized. How are mere mortals supposed to guess what will be easy for our users?
David N Schaffer November 12th, 2009 12:56:37 PM