Slate’s recent arti­cle, “2011 Was a Ter­ri­ble Year for Tech”, coins the term “mom-bomb” for the moment that tech­nol­ogy jour­nal­ists declare a gad­get so easy-to-use that it is actu­ally use­ful to peo­ple who aren’t tech­nol­ogy journalists:

He begins by prais­ing the gadget’s intu­itive inter­face and its easy setup process, but even­tu­ally he finds that mere descrip­tion doesn’t ade­quately con­vey the product’s momen­tous sim­plic­ity. That’s when he drops the mom bomb: This thing is so easy that even my mom could use it.

I’m blessed with par­ents that, by and large, ‘get’ tech­nol­ogy.  Their VCR never flashed 12:00 (and now they have a DVD recorder); they both have Android phones that they can hap­pily e-mail from.  My grand­par­ents are a dif­fer­ent story, of course.  Two of them have almost never used a com­puter, but my Grand­dad has a nice new shiny one and uses it reg­u­larly.  But as the arti­cle points out, what tech jour­nal­ists and we tech-savvy users think is sim­ple and ‘user-friendly’ often falls far short of the ‘mom (or grand­dad) test’.

A few obser­va­tions spring to mind:

• Mov­ing pho­tos from a dig­i­tal cam­era to a com­puter is one of the sim­plest tasks non-‘tech-savvy’ users often want to do.  But when you plug in a dig­i­tal cam­era, Win­dows 7 help­fully pops up this dia­log:
  Do I want to “Import Pic­tures and Videos” using Win­dows, or using Win­dows Live Photo Gallery?  What’s the dif­fer­ence?  Do I want to “Copy pic­tures to [my] com­puter”?  Do I want to “Down­load images”? Where will the pho­tos go?  Will they still be on the cam­era?  I just want to see my pho­tos, so I click “Open device to view files”, but what the heck is “DCIM”?
• I set Google as his browser home­page, and since then, he has been get­ting his news not from the BBC News book­mark I cre­ated, but using the ‘News’ link on Google’s own menu that appears at the top of its pages:
  
  

  
  …which is great, except that Google can change that menu at any time.  And of course they are doing exactly that:
  
  

  
  To my grand­dad, and many other novice inter­net users, the dis­tinc­tion between book­marks — which only change if you want them to — and web page nav­i­ga­tion menus — which can change at the webmaster’s whim — is not nec­es­sar­ily clear.

• Even sim­ple mouse com­mands can be unclear and dif­fi­cult.  In the exam­ple above, Google’s instruc­tion to find the new menu is to ‘roll over’ the logo.  When the novice user fig­ures out that means ‘hover the cur­sor over’, they’re greeted with a JavaScript popup which will dis­ap­pear again if their cur­sor acci­den­tally wan­ders too far from the popup.

It’s my fam­ily duty to be tech sup­port, and occa­sion­ally I am called upon to fix things that have actu­ally gone wrong.  But more often than not, I am called upon to try to ratio­nalise a sim­ple task that is unex­pect­edly com­plex to per­form.  This com­plex­ity has usu­ally arisen because the software’s devel­op­ers and most vocal users are so immersed in com­mon UI par­a­digms that they just don’t notice that the com­plex­ity exists.  For the novice user, on the other hand, even your software’s instal­la­tion wiz­ard is com­plex­ity they’d rather not deal with.

The Slate arti­cle is right to cite Facebook’s user inter­face as a par­tic­u­larly oner­ous exam­ple of soft­ware com­plex­ity.  Feeds, live updates, inboxes, hid­den inboxes, walls, pro­files, Time­line, com­ments, likes, tags — some users need and revel in that level of com­plex­ity, but a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber just want to, say, see what their kids are up to.  I’m ner­vous that one day soon, my grand­dad will ask me to set him up with a Face­book account.  I’ll duti­fully com­ply, log him in, and give him this:

Where does one even begin?  There are mul­ti­ple feeds, mul­ti­ple menus, pop-up and pop-down boxes.  How do you add one of these “sta­tus” things?  How do you add a friend?  How do I send a mes­sage to some­one?  What’s pub­lic and what’s pri­vate?  Why is there so much stuff?

In the world of User Expe­ri­ence (UX) design, we spend so much time think­ing about how soft­ware will be used and by whom — per­sonas, use cases, red routes and all the rest.  But in the major­ity of soft­ware I see when work­ing with novice users, it seems that either the novice user has not been con­sid­ered, or their per­sona is paid lip ser­vice while the lat­est excit­ingly com­pli­cated new fea­tures are bolted onto the software.

As cre­ators of soft­ware and of user expe­ri­ences, I know we can do bet­ter than this.

Do you have any thoughts on how we can design bet­ter for the novice user?  Just want to vent about an app with a par­tic­u­larly poor UI, or about a rel­a­tive with a par­tic­u­larly poor grasp of com­put­ing?  Fire away in the com­ments below!