Simplicity Rules

My latest Webmonkey article is about cookies, those simple little bits of data that sites store on our computers through a browser. Specifically, I write about the need to know whether the user has cookies enabled before the cookies are used.

The tutorial has code examples in three languages:

• JavaScript cookie sniffer
• PHP cookie sniffer
• ASP.NET cookie sniffer

In April Paul Kedrosky wrote against the simplicity cult. When I named my biz-tech writings Simplicity Rules, I didn’t intend to join a cult. I thought I was being original, even. Now I realize there is an unmistakable collective consciousness pushing toward, among other things, white backgrounds and large fonts.

A friend of mine has an email signature with this Einstein quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

That’s the definition of simplicity that we members of the cult should follow. Kedrosky was really warning against being too simple.

Adaptive Path is a user experience firm whose work I admire, but I’ve never really agreed with one of their common examples. They citeUSDA’s Hay Net as “the best website I’ve ever seen.” The home page has two links: “Have hay” and “Need hay.”

Even if we assume this approach works for Hay Net, it certainly won’t work for most sites. In most cases, this is too simple.

So… I like mustaches. Naturally, when Dustin Mierau created iStache, he thought of me. Well, maybe not, but a couple of my friends did.

iStache is a desktop application for Mac that does one thing somewhat well. It opens a photo and gives you several mustache choice to include in the photo. No fancy features, like moving it around or rotating/scaling to fit the picture. This is truly simple software that would have worked great as a Web application.

And yet I’m still left enamoured. I told you I like mustaches. How about you? Check out more iStaches.

Thanks to Tom and John (and Dustin!) for making my day.

This week I attended a panel discussion about building online communities. Among my many great “take-aways” was this gem:

Traffic does not equal community.

On one hand, obvious. Yet, it still gave me an “aha” moment.

When you’re around the Web every day, and all the talk is getting more traffic, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re actually achieving.

Take a site like YouTube, the video sharing service that has more traffic than God. It has comments, user profiles, and voting, staples of many communities. But it’s not what I’d call a community. (Perhaps it follows my social network rules too closely?).

Granted, you can get traffic (even do good stuff) and make plenty of money without having any visitor interaction. There are thousands of people who start forums and buy posts in bulk from people who make fake accounts. This is actually accepted practice. They game the system, get into search results, and get lots of traffic.

For now, on the Web traffic may still equal dollars, but it sure doesn’t make it a community.

Elliot has something to say about “Real SEO” (search engine optimization). His advice is similar to what I said about doing good stuff, only he approaches it from Google’s standpoint:

“Google’s main goal is to get people using their search engine, and the best way to do that is to get the best content at the top of the results. So regardless of what numbers their algorithms use, we still know what their algorithms do. Find good content and put it at the top.”

You could take another step back there and get at what this is really about: the user. Live by the page paradigm, do good stuff, and the traffic / search rankings / fame / TV deal on the network of your choice will follow.

You know that one Seinfeld episode where George does the opposite and has all sorts of success? Well, I’m sure it doesn’t always work, but here are a couple business examples:

• Fred Franzia, maker of Two Buck Chuck and other “value wines:” he took an industry that gets by on mystique and high margins, and went cheap.
• Sharelle Klaus started an upscale soda company. Rather than fight out margins-in-cents with Coke and Pepsi, Klaus focused on nice restaurants and specialty grocers. She’s making non-alcoholic chic.

Got any others? Even better, how about opposites that didn’t make it?

Nick Bradbury has a neat, quick take on the history menu in browsers. For years it’s been easy to bad-mouth Microsoft and their Internet Explorer browser, but I am encouraged to see even small innovations coming out of Redmond.

Read Nick’s Rethinking Simple Things.

An ATM has a small, finite number of possible operations. At its most complicated, a machine can accept withdrawls, deposits, transfers, give balance information, and dispense stamps.

To accomplish this, ATMs have about eight buttons and a keypad.

source

Yet, to me, the experience of using an ATM is usually clunky. It’s as if the interface is too simple.

But if an ATM wasn’t so brain-dead easy to use, more users might make mistakes. In most interactions with computers, it’s not a big deal to do something wrong. On the web, you just click the back button. When it comes to our money, we want to avoid even mistakes that don’t matter.

Why aren’t we striving for that kind of clarity in all our interfaces? Probably for the same reason we don’t type using a joy stick to select letters on a virtual keyboard. Sometimes an interface is too simple.

Since it is so easy for me to grab forty bucks, it still has me admiring how much an ATM can do with so little. Do I sound split on this? I am. So, I find myself asking two questions:

1. What can the Web learn from ATMs?
2. What can ATMs learn from the Web?

It wasn’t really until I got the call from my sister that I stopped to think of the impact. From preschool through junior high, I spent every afternoon with grandma “Haha.” Unlike with my parents, I can’t point to the obvious ways she influenced my life, but the sheer volume of hours speaks for itself.

She died last Wednesday, two weeks shy of her ninety-first birthday. Or, as she would call it, “pushing one hundred.”

The local paper has a nice obit that includes a classic quote from my uncle Jim. Gradma would not have cared that the paper’s Web site doesn’t include anchored links that would let me point to the exact spot on the page. Not only was she not up on this internet stuff, but she was all about putting others before her. She would have graciously taken second billing to J. Hayes Hunter.

My cousin created the nick-name Haha, after grandma’s laugh, which included a full backwards neck-tilt for an exaggerated, perfect guffaw. It seemed appropriate, then, through the tears at the memorial, there were plenty of laughs.

Boiling user behavior in any situation down to a simple list of rules is tough. And often, incomplete. That said, The Page Paradigm misses very little in its two step process:

For every Web page, visitors will either
1. Click something that gets them closer to their goal.
2. Click the back button (or otherwise leave)

This is a pretty powerful–and easy–question to ask about each of your pages. Answering the question might be tough. If it is, chances are you have more to discover about your site and your visitors.

My friend Mike Duffy, who turned me on to this concept, has incorporated it into what he calls visitor effectiveness. He focuses on winery websites, but your site likely has audience segments you need to consider separately.