User Experience - Keeping it Simple
User Experience of any product (be it a mobile phone.. or software or microwave oven.. or anything) excels only when things are simple to use.. simple to learn. This is the fundamental mantra teached/advised by every usability courses and Gurus.
Not all people have time to learn a product fully and use it effectively. When people have less time to spare for learning, it is the experience-designer’s job to ensure, the product is learnable as quickly as possible by the user. When the user fails to learn the basics within his comfort time, the product is in trouble.
In software :
Keeping it simple doesn’t mean that you should write a simple code in the back-end. This popular Keeping It Simple (KIS) principle applies to the user-experience. No matter how complicated the software’s internal core is, it is the front-end or the presentation layer’s ability to present a usable interface to make the product succeed.
Flickr and YouTube are numero-uno in their domain. Why? coz they are easy to use. Why Mac OS excels? coz it hides all the complexity of the BSD Unix and presents a really simple yet powerful user interface. Why iPod became one of the best selling gadgets in history? its simple design and simple user-interface.
So remember “KIS” principle in experience design. IOW, this principle is popularly called as “KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid”.