I am constantly being frustrated by too much or not enough simplicity.
Let me explain.
There are times when one really needs simplicity. I love Google Reader – I go to the page, everything is there, ready for me to read. I scroll down, and it marks items as read as I pass them. If i have to stop in the middle, I go back later and the items I have read are gone, others are still there. Dead simple and that’s why it works well.
However, sometimes you just need options. I’m trying out a project management system called Homebase at work. We’re looking for a way to help us manage our 36 some odd projects- not only manage the tasks and to do’s, but the often overlapping people, the meetings, and resources. I like that Homebase is simple for the user- We’re never going to be able to get anyone to use it if it complicated, they need the equivalent of Google reader- damn simple and easy. However, I am frustrated by the lack of options on the back end. You can separate people in to “Companies” – but that’s the ONLY way you can sort them. And one person can’t be in more than one company. You can set due dates, but no times. There’s little in the way of email options. The rss feed is password protected, which makes it difficult to use, and there’s no option to un-encrypt it. There’s no way to sign up for email updates, and you can’t set a reply to address for the emails that get sent. My biggest beef is that the software does nothing to help my most time consuming task: setting meetings.
I could go on and on, but the point is- I need options. I need to be able to customize the hell out of it until it works exactly right. Front end=simplicity. Back end=lots of complicated options. Is that so hard?
The problem is, no software package can be everything to everyone, and so some just say “fine, we’ll just be simple.” It’s the same problem that gives us feature crawl in gadgets- I would love a cell phone that takes high quality pictures and makes calls and that’s it. But if another person also wants texting, and person ‘C’ over there wants to watch multimedia, we end up with gadgets that aim to please everyone and end up pleasing no one.
There’s been a lot of talk in library land about what a library should be. Last month’s “American Libraries” featured a column about how maybe Librarians should make some judgment calls about what materials we present to the community (to which several people have said “no, that’s not our place to decide” – and I agree.) There’s been talk about which is better, a noisy or a quiet library. Ideally, you’ll have options (a quiet and a noisy area), but in a small library, you can’t do that- it’s either quiet or noisy.
Here’s the really hard wall I keep running myself up against: you can’t please everyone. You just can’t no matter what you do; someone will be unhappy. Some people want simplicity, some want options. Some want you to decide for them, some want to decide everything for themselves. This is the reason that I keep scratching my head when I read about usability of a site, because I always thing “usability for who?”