Designing mainstream products
What is better software? Most have had the experience of screaming obscenities to your computer, in lack of better actions to make it do as you want it to. A few have had the more pleasant experience of using a killer application that just does the job right – first try.
Frustration over bad software is a shared emotion whether you are an expert user or a plain dummy. Being able to use software should not have anything to do with knowing how to use cryptic, flexible and feature-rich user interfaces.
Companies that develop mainstream products cater for large market segments. In the process of pleasing everybody, the resulting software is packed to the max with features and flexibility so everybody can use the product in their own preferred way. Much money is spent on usability experts who are to foresee the needs of the target users and find ways in which all their needs can be incorporated into a final product.
Designing and using software are two different things.
Most users never get to explore the functionality and flexibility that is intended for the market segment they belong to. They quickly learn what is necessary to get the job done, and are happy to just know that. The job could probably be done in a smoother and more pleasing way, but as long as it gets done there is no incentive to do it better.
The earlier mentioned obscenities emerge when the user wishes to use the product in another way than what normally gets the job done. The big flexibility and the abundant amount of features now acts as a barrier for the user to discover the probably great feature that will get the job done in a better way. Even though the software was designed with a certain user in mind, it was also designed with a trillion other users in mind – many with their own specific feature(s).
Especially one thing can help design mainstream products that are actually usable for both expert and dummy users.
- Design as general as possible. Pleasing a big market segment is not about creating loads of features for each of the market segments, but a question of creating only few features that can please as many market segments as possible.
Mainstream products should not be designed only for either expert users or dummy users nor design part of the product to work for the expert and the other part of the product for the dummy. So choose few features over many features. Chose few features that please the general majority rather than the majority of features pleasing a few. If you have designed for the general majority, it shouldn’t matter if the user is an expert or a dummy.
Forget the market-segment-specific features: target the segments in your marketing – not in your product.