Application Design Voodoo

from Christopher Nolan's film "Memento"

PR pro, author, blogger, quantum physics’ excellent guy and friend Joel Postman just posted a new article What Do They Mean by Social Any Way?

I recommend you to go read it first.

OK, welcome back. As I read Joel’s post I was processing some ideas in the background which may or may not be unrelated, these are the thoughts his post triggered, anyway:

1) “More” social network features don’t necessarily translate into “better” social networks. Hence the socialness of a network is not necessarily helped by tons of social features. Facebook have also been proof of it, doing regular dashboard cleanups, throwing all those fancy apps to the background. Thank God.

It can be argued that if you throw in more social features, your sample of good social features should also grow, because you’re trying many more new ideas at once and more of them will stick. the problem with this approach is that you’re at risk of making the thing cluttered and incomprehensible. Facebook was this close to getting there at some point, they reverted course since then.

2) On the other hand, producing applications that are poor in features greatly reduces your potential of being useful for a wide public. Overload of features is dubbed by some “featuritis” but this problem is really debatable. What they’re frequently arguing against is really against clutter and making too many features available at once, at the wrong time or the wrong places.

Two main desirable features of any application on any platform are discoverability and user interface simplicity. When succesful, these usually go together.

The key to success in these matters is threefold:

1. Empower users, give them all the features they need, never less of it, don’t subestimate your users. “featuritis” is misplaced. those who use that term are actually talking about clutter, which is a different kind of problem.
2. Hide the less frequently used features so that the main functions don’t become incomprehensible, or difficult to tell from those that are rarely used.
3. Make the less frequently used features discoverable. human beings are unable to learn everything at once, they generally do progress bit by bit. Your features are hidden, but they’re not too far away that they become a buried treasure. You encourage your users to discover more bit by bit after they learn the basics, with a learning curve that is not too steep.

I’ts strange to me how poorly understood this still is in year 2010, after decades of application design.
The Web 2.0 was beneficial in some ways, and has been detrimental in many others, one of them is a “Memento”-like sense of always being discovering things for the first time, when in actuality these findings are what we’ve collectively known all along.

Not a critique to Joel, obviously… he’s not a designer after all… but the voodoo way of dealing with these matters in many Web 2.0 circles is really remarkable.