May 31, 2009, 
Tagged If you are not aware of this already, I am a student at the Aarhus Technical College, studying Multimedia Design and Communication. One of the topics covered in our programme is “Visualisation” where we learn interesting stuff about the way we have to design the websites, the logos and almost anything related to the interaction with the user.
The thing that was pretty obvious but shocked me a little when I heard it is what our teacher told us once on the 1st semester: Internet users are mostly idiots. Well, this is a thing the web developers should have to comply with and design websites and applications as easy to use as possible. There is one downside however in this situation: making an application look simple does not mean that the application itself has to be simple. The best possible combination is a website with a complex functionality and a clean and simple design. Of course, this complexity I am talking about is very relative and should be taken as granted.
One thing that I disliked while reading an article on a Romanian blog some days ago (I lost the bookmark to the article, so I don’t have a link to it nor do I remember who wrote it) stated the same thing about the idiocracy present in most of the internet users. I was very disappointed to learn that the author of the article didn’t have any solutions to make his website users interact the way he wanted them to. His attitude was something like “Well, they are idiots and there’s nothing I can do about it except trying to bring more intelligent people to my website”. I completely disagree with this opinion as I really think that no matter of the IQ level of each particular user, they should all be able to use and navigate a website as easier as possible.
How do you guys design your websites and what design arguments do you take into consideration?
Well, as a app developer I mostly do usability testing beforehand: PACT analysis, focus groups, user polling and implicating a core group of users while doing interface mash ups. That and further modifications when the app goes live.
I guess you have a problem when a user asks you to implement something that is already in your app; this means that he can’t find it and you have a problem.
On the other hand, users may be stupid but some developers have issues. You name a button with ON and after you click on it it turns to OFF; does that mean that when the button says ON the function is turned on or that you have to click it (thus changing it to OFF) in order to activate the function? Couple this with the fact that the function takes some time to start (gathers some links and analyzes some statistics) and you get the typical “now what the fuck do I do?”. Yes, I’m looking at you tr.im! I sat there about 10 minutes thinking about what the button does until I gave up and looked at the underlying code.
Andrew, you are fully right with the usability testing, it’s just that sometimes you can’t find anyone who fits your target group, willing to test your product.
one good example of a clean interface yet complex functionality is Facebook which is absolutely brilliant if you consider its usability and the way the interface looks like.
The simplest way is to think like an idiot. Everythig has to be in clear sight, and very ibtuitive, even this means it should be designed like a 1995 website. No buttons with on/off nothing like this only simple things with every thing in the same place… why because you should think everyone is more stupid than you, and even though i use this philosophy i have some not so good feedbacks about a misplacement of a category which doesn’t seems right to be anywhere else.
Victor i had some rendezvouss with facebook which has a very clean design but isn’t very easy to use thinking how me and other friends of mine which aren’t completly idiots struggled to find some functions.
And quoting a friend of mine: “Do it for you, if you like it then it’s ok!” this was about a website i have never ever started, why? I didn’t like any of the design ideas i came with.