John C. Dvorak is Smoking Crack: He Doesn’t Know What Users Want
Posted on August 30th, 2006 in Usability | 8 Comments »
In his column Microsoft Office vs. the World—No Contest, Dvorak writes the following:
“Currently the way most people think they can beat Word is by making something light-weight or faster or less complicated. Ideally this is all well and good, but people still choose complexity over simplicity when given a choice. This is a sad fact of life, so get over it. Ideally the best model is complexity combined with ease of use.”
People choose complexity over simplicity? I don’t know what world Dvorak inhabits, but virtually all normal people want things to be easy not complex. Geeks and engineers and poets love complexity, but average folks really hate it. Would your grandmother prefer a VCR with one magic button that did everything for her, or would she like 38 blinking lights, 3 knobs, and 17 buttons? Um, yeah.
Dvorak’s last comment about complexity combined with ease of use is also off base. He’s throwing out a treat to usability folks, but he falls terribly short. He fails because he equates complexity with robust functionality.
(Complexity is the opposite of simplicity.)
I want tons and tons of functionality but I don’t want the often associated pain of complexity. I don’t care about associations, nuances, hidden meanings, or anything else that potentially leads to chaos. Give me a simple interface but give me the world. Leave the extra buttons to the geeks who care about them.
I’ll end by sayng that Dvorak is issuing commands, as usual, with out any data whatsoever. Why should we take him on his word on this matter. He’s been writing about technology for a long time. He’s familiar with compelxity and he assumes other people accept pain. That’s the wrong answer these days. Users demand usability. Further, there is excellent research which very clearly demonstrates that users prefer simplicity over complexity [edited: was incorrectly "complexity over simplicity"]. You can also just ask a friend: Do you prefer the Google search interface? Why? “Because it is so freakin’ simple.”
8 Responses
I’m not a Dvorak fan, but I disagree with your interpretation of his comments, John.
Dvorak wrote that people “choose” complexity and that’s true. Of course, they aren’t looking for the package that says “Now more complex!”, but they are buying the product that has more features (there was just a study on this). Generally, more features means more complexity.
It’s also true that they want simplicity, but generally not over a perceived infererior product.
The other thing to keep in mind is that consumers don’t make rational decisions (Seth Godin just blogged about this). They are swayed by marketers and make emotionally-based decisions. And, most of the time, marketing is convincing people that more is better (the iPod is the obvious counter-example).
“Geeks, engineers and poets love complexity” . Really?
What you’re talking about basic desirability when we struggle with terms like functionality versus complexity. What developers want to sell is different from what tests well on the shelf (choice desirability) and days and weeks into use (use desirability). What the user wants are benefits, not features.
Techies don’t mind complexity, one of the benefits is it keeps out the riff-raff the other is demonstrating how smart they are. People desire to feel smart, and indespensible, that’s why work evironments will test differently from home environments. And marketing managers can point to tests where consumers choose feature lists on boxes, even though they also know returns can be much higher later.
People are in ond mode when choosing and use a different cognitive model when using. Until designers understand this, you’ll get this seeming paradox time and time again. There are ways to design for this to produce adequate sales and lower returns.
“Geeks, engineers and poets love complexity.” Really?
In my experience, yes. To be more clear, a geek (e.g., programmer) is likely to enjoy complexity, particularly technical complexity, more than my grandmother. Obviously there are excellent exceptions, such as the satisfaction associated with elegant code, which might be very simple. In any event, I’ll stand by by opinion, which is all that it is. There are plenty of ways to demonstrate that I wrong. I can live with that.
I read the posting thinking that your take on the Dvorak article was fairly astute. But then, toward the end of your post I read this: “…Further, there is excellent research which very clearly demonstrates that users prefer complexity over simplicity.”
Your entire post, up until this point, has proffered that users prefer simplicity and robustness. Not that users prefer complexity. You are as confusing as Dvorak is inaccurate.
AND, against one of your axioms, in your post you misspelled complexity as “compelxity.”
Come on John, practice what you preach!
Joe, that was actually a typo which I corrected. Sorry about that; thanks for catching it. Users prefer simplicity!
“Would your grandmother prefer a VCR with one magic button that did everything for her, or would she like 38 blinking lights, 3 knobs, and 17 buttons? Um, yeah.”
The magic button. Right up until the moment she presses it and it does something different to what she expects, because it doesn’t do the same as it did last time she pressed it like that.
I think this is a common flaw of user interface designs these days: everyone seems to want fewer buttons, so they overload each button to do more things. This just decreases the predictability of what the button will do, which is clearly a bad thing. Take mobile phones as an example: there are certain brands of phone that have a number pad and one big button that does everything: dial, hang up, answer, menu.
This is great until you try to bring up the menu while you’re talking to someone.
My grandmother doesn’t care about the 98 things the VCR could do for her. Instead, she cares about 4-5 things and that’s it. It is very likely that many other grandmothers feel exactly the same way. They want a couple of key pieces of functionality and a couple of buttons. They’d like a simple interface with clear language, simple buttons, and simple instructions in a large font.