I posted earlier that Barbara Nelson of Pragmatic Marketing will be one of the presenters at ProductCamp this Saturday. When a company I was working with six years ago hired Pragmatic Marketing to teach everyone their system, it was a definite game changer, and she was the one who taught the course.  For my part, as a software engineer, I learned from her how to work much more closely and effectively with the marketeers.  The insights we all gained from Pragmatic Marketing’s experience were invaluable.  They are lessons that I continue to apply every day.

As just one tiny example, I’m reminded of an Aha! moment I experienced back then. It was the notion that novices don’t typically stay novices for very long.

Paraphrasing a 2004 article by Nelson, good software may very well be complex, but that complexity needs to be hidden from the user as much as possible. Nelson cited Intuit’s Quicken as a prime example. “They learned what regular people needed by spending time in people’s homes, watching how they managed their home finances. Quicken was the first finance package to use the checkbook metaphor, something regular people already understood. Quicken was hugely successful, and even with dozens of competitors, managed to gain 75% market-share because it was easier to use. It was the first product to take a customer-oriented view instead of a data-centric view.”  It still hold true today, more than ever.  By now, you’ve probably seen Intuit’s commercials where they talk about how TurboTax is as easy to use as following the turn-by-turn directions of a GPS unit.

One way to hide complexity is through a guided UI (a.k.a. a wizard or an interview). A common misconception is that a wizard makes a good UI for novices, when in fact they are more properly employed to address infrequent tasks, and should have nothing to do with whether or not the user is a novice.  There’s a pretty rapid transition from novice user, to experienced user, to expert.  Novices aren’t novices for very long (when performing a frequent task).  Sp, writing a guided UI for a frequent task is bad, because it eventually bogs the user down. On the other hand, a guided UI is perfect for an infrequent task, especially a complicated, critical, or finicky one, no matter whether the user is generally regarded as a novice, intermediate, or advanced. You might say that when it comes to infrequent tasks, every user is always a novice.