This is a huge problem for young & old software companies.

Startups run by technical founders can get over-excited by their clever technical features and forget to clearly explain what the software does or the benefits.

Older “bloated” software gets so many extra “improvements” bolted on, it makes it hard to learn. Eric Ries has some great advice on continual deployment, he noted that no-one noticed or cared about the majority of “improvements”, so add them one-at-a-time, text and if they don’t make a significant benefit remove them.

I love the “clear first, clever second.” quote and will recycle it frequently

Dino – Thanks for commenting! And who knows, maybe I was reading your mind … that’d be a neat trick

“Then keep that top of mind – and more importantly, keep your customers front and center – whenever doing any product design and development.
Make sure you do usability testing with customers and non-customers
(because you want to know how well non-customers on-board into becoming
customers!) Make sure you test. ” – you may as well, in the next post,
teach us how do you do this, what kind of mechanism you have developed.
what kind of systematized procedure you have setup to achieve this. 

Great idea and information! Thanks for sharing it.

I have found that my dyslexia has been a gift throughout the years I have worked as a UX and in digital products design and architecture, although I didn’t know I was dyslexic until a few months ago when I had it diagnosed professionally.

My tips are:

1. Always ask yourself WWMMD (what would my mum do?). You know she is not stupid or dumb, she’s just haven’t had the experience of playing with all the Web 2.0 websites out there to learn and transfer the UI language from one application to another. For example, in a web of buttons and radio boxes, what would be like for someone to meet ajax sliders for the first time? Asking yourself these kind of questions help you to consider whether you will just place the sliders there on the page or place them on the page AND instruct people graphically or textually to drag them or click anywhere in the slider bar to make it move to users’ desired position. 

2. Reverse engineer your first time learning experiences and commit them to memory. Most people are keen to show the results of their learning: “you press here, then you click here, then you do this and Kapow, done!” but few actually re-visit the experience once they get to their destination. This is lost gold. 

To cultivate an empathic mind one must concentrate on documenting (even if mentally) what startled them first, what kind of wrong little assumptions were made initially before proficiency of the UI was achieved. This is important as they tend to be very silly for the eyes of the learner-user, be it product user or the product designer, and easily discarded as “the person’s own stupidity getting on the way”.

3. Design with organic memory in mind. When we are doing things the first time, there is a constant exchange between the short term memory (new knowledge) and the long term memory (crystallised knowledge and experience). Dyslexia affects short term memory but people with more conventional brain makeups also have difficulty keeping a lot of new stuff in the short memory and using all that information to get things done for the first time.

When creating a new product, train yourself to see features and tasks from the perspective of three degrading pieces of information. 

The first piece will get you started and that is what your “RAM” is going to be working hard to process, if the first piece is intuitive enough, the second and third pieces will lay comfortably in the background just waiting for their turn. When one gets to the second piece, the first is set to its way to be forgotten a little and the third to be discovered. By the time one gets to the third piece, the first bit is pushed even further to the back of the short term memory and depending on the ease of use and intuitiveness closer to be saved to your “hard drive” and become crystallised knowledge (by the way this is iterative and with the brain the picture gets clearer and better defined with use, pretty much like film photography development as the film goes from one chemical tray to another. 

A system could possess 20 pieces of information to be processed but as long as they are intuitive, logically organised and self-contained one shouldn’t have a problem to get the interaction flowing. 

In other words, you should aim to get your users to feel they can understand the focus piece, remember with some detail what they just did before, be reminded what they did earlier and understand what is coming next.

All the best, 

Luis  

? shared this article my webpage.
thanks
webpage: http://www.indirtube.com

Craig – Appreciate the comment, thanks for stopping by. I agree that customers can  be some of the trickiest people to deal with; they have lots of feedback, lots of “must-haves” and it becomes hard to prioritize and understand what’s really necessary. It’s also risky to build against customer requirements, only to leave new customers – that don’t want a “feature rich” / complex solution – behind and uninterested.