Question number 4 is can I make it simpler? 1
And the answer is usually yes. 2
Now this is an example of when bad user experience or bad design can kill. 3
Now why is that? 4
This is a piece of software called Power Shot. 5
And in the UK it's used up and down the country by doctors, nurses and health professionals in order 6
to manage patients in hospital. 7
Now it allows you to do a number of things such as look at which investigations the patients had, what 8
are the results, what diagnoses have they had better etc.. 9
Now it is such a horrendously complicated piece of software. 10
Just look up here at the three rows of buttons. You know even Microsoft doesn't do this anymore in their 11
latest Office software. 12
This is a horrendously designed piece of enterprise software. 13
Now the story goes that the nurses were being introduced to this new computer system and they were looking 14
after a little girl who was on chemotherapy. 15
And when you're on chemotherapy, you tend to need regular fluid flushes through your veins so that the 16
chemicals don't destroy your kidneys. 17
And the nurses were so confused by this piece of software that they ended up forgetting about the little 18
girl who needed the IV flushes and she almost went into kidney failure. 19
So even though we think that, you know, the job of a designer is just purely for vanity is all about appearance, 20
but actually it's so much more than that and you should always keep in mind to keep things as simple 21
as possible. 22
And this is one of the reasons why hardware and software from Apple is so delightful to use because 23
in most cases it's just very simple. 24
It's something that you can give to your grandmother. So you should think always you know is your tech, 25
is your app, is your website grandma proof. 26
You know if you took it to her, would she know how to use it or would she get confused by all the buttons? 27
Now 28
the app equivalent of this program is something like this where you have rows upon rows of buttons a 29
million different colors, 30
tightly packed user interface. 31
I mean whenever you find yourself making two rows of buttons, then you should probably smack yourself 32
on the wrist because this will never ever work 33
well. Most of us have thumbs that are way too big to be able to differentiate between whether he pressed 34
this button or whether if you press this button. And you will frustrate users to no end if you implement 35
two rows of buttons and they keep pressing on the wrong thing. 36
So think about simplicity. 37
Always always try to make things simpler. 38
Now this is an example of the onboarding screen of an app called Ness. 39
Now the core objective of this app is to allow users to discover dishes that are around them and things 40
that they might enjoy. 41
But when you first download the app, they give you this long tutorial with things that should be pretty 42
intuitive. 43
For example, most of us know that this symbol means probably something to do with changing the time or 44
the symbol probably means something to do with changing the location. 45
You don't have to explicitly tell people about it. And it can feel really condescending 46
as a user to be told what every little button does 47
even though it seems quite intuitive. 48
Now this is an app called Food spotting and they have the same goal and objective as Ness. Essentially 49
helps users discover good dishes near them and all it does is that as soon as you open up the app, it 50
tries to find your location and then immediately shows you the dishes that are close by. 51
So remember when we said earlier that you have to identify the core objective of the users for using 52
your app and then try to minimize the number of steps that it takes to achieve that, 53
it cut down three or four taps to essentially zero because everything is loaded up automatically. 54
So Simplicity is key. 55
You can always make things simpler. 56
Scrap everything until you're left with the very basic and then add features and add things onto it 57
as and when users demand it because you can always keep things simpler.