Good usability is like "water flowing downhill"

"I prefer reactions in which the fabric of the organization is changed so that it's easier for people to do the "right" thing. Like water flowing downhill." Silkandspinach's Kevin Rutherford said that in a comment to David HH's post don't scar on the first cut, and I loved it on the spot.

I've talked about this many times before; my horse trainer's mantra is, "Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard"--but the opposite is everywhere. It's ridiculously easy for me to screw up the settings on my digital devices. The API methods that intuivitely feel right turn out to be dead wrong. I click the button I think will do X, and instead I get... WTF?

And sometimes, many times, those screw-ups are hard to undo. Sometimes, they're unrecoverable (or might as well be, since the documentation never seems to cover the most likely bad thing you'll do).

But while my earlier comments on this were mostly about usability, I hadn't thought of it as a management principle. (Works great with kids, too) Think about how many procedures we see in companies that feel like hacks... workarounds for a system that makes it too easy to make mistakes. And you see it from the highest levels of business right down to the duct tape someone put over the switch that you must NEVER EVER TURN OFF.

If those designing systems or software or houses or hardware or API's or policies or procedures or learning experiences or... if they we would all keep the image of water flowing downhill at the front of our minds, it might make a big difference. It might remind us just how much more elegant things could be if we made the right things easy and the wrong things hard.

It works with pets, and it works with employees (not that I would ever imply that employees are ever treated like... dogs). It works with kids and customers. It works with nature. And that's the best model of all--to make the right things seem natural. If a user/learner/employee couldn't imagine doing something any way other than the right one, they won't have to waste so much time and mental bandwidth finding and fixing mistakes.

That's not to say that everything should be easy and natural. But the challenges should never be in the use of a thing. The challenges should be in doing whatever it is the thing lets you do. The challenges are what makes the activity engaging and, in many cases, worth it. But the tools you use to meet those challenges should get out of your way!

Playing the game should be challenging. The interface should be brainless.

Figuring out what simulations to run for your new business idea should be challenging. Making the spreadsheet do it should be simple.

Defining what your code should do should be challenging. Figuring out which API methods will give you that capability should be simple.

Figuring out which music I want to buy for my perfect late-night-coding playlist should be challenging. Buying it from iTunes should be dead simple (and it is).

So, thanks for that quote Kevin.

And while we're on quotes... our blog friend Rimantas sent me another fantastic one, this time by Zed Shaw:

"If I KMFU (Know My F*ing Users) they won't have to RTFM."

(The quote is in an O'Reilly interview, and Rimantas got to it by way of this link from why.)