Simplify a Complex User Experience Last year, one of my teams was tasked with creating the architecture for the next generation of a core enterprise application. Later, we had to also build the main features for that app. New versions always turn out to be a lot harder to build than they should but this project was clearly going to have troubles. It needed to be executed on a narrow timeline but the organizational silos made it really hard to negotiate priorities and changes. We were working a lot closer to waterfall than we were to agile and the legacy systems had little to do with the new plans. I can’t count how many things I heard that this project might not go live if we didn’t deliver at least two months before the roll-off date. The last two months were reserved for preparing training materials and to train employees. It was not the first time they introduced major changes in this app, so they had a pretty streamlined process for training their teams. This training effort seemed to make sense for most people, but it did not for me. We work on products that are launched to massive audiences with no training whatsoever. We build products that users can learn to use themselves. These products should be simple and intuitive. I understand that not everyone is tech savvy or learns with the same ease, but my feeling is that the training should be embedded within the application itself. You might read a quick tutorial when you start using a new product, but once you cover the basics only then can you measure how your audience is truly using it. You can analyze how the users are interacting with the system and teach them contextually how to make better use of it. I like to build applications that encourage users to discover things for themselves, and provide ways to do something better. I like reinforcing desired behavior. Take a Peek at a Different Industry Matias Rodriguez shared this talk with me in 2013’s Game Developer Conference. If you can’t spare an hour to watch it, I’ll summarize. Nasa explains how kids learned to command fictional star fleets using video games. While doing so they mastered very complex interfaces all by themselves NASA realized how much money they were spending on their control centers, how much training they required, and how much harder to use these centers were. This talk made me want to understand what is it that lowers the entry-level barrier on video games. I wondered how people naturally learn to handle such intricate User Experiences and make real-time live or die decisions. There has to be something wrong with the way we’ve been doing things if a human resources system is harder to handle than a star fleet. If you plan to spend money in massive or periodic training for your team, you must spend it by making your system a “living” manual. It shouldn’t offer generic and boring lessons, but instead it should understand what behavior needs to be changed and help the user to improve. There are a lot of mechanics that games have that can help […]
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