Mavens and mums: the problem of interface design

Interesting article about Maven traps. The theory goes that mavens are people that other people ask opinions about things. For example I’m going to buy a new car in a couple of weeks and I know pretty much nothing about cars, so I ask a family friend for advice about the car I’m thinking of buying (and where to buy, how much to pay) because I know he’s into cars. The article is about how to get these people to say good things about your products.

I’m a web developer and I’ve a bee in my bonnet about making sites that are straight forward for people without much technical experience to use without making your site incredibly frustrating for anyone who’s a bit more technically savy. It’s a difficult problem. I’ve watched my mum (my favourite non-techie user) battle with the computer. She’s a little bit intimidated by the whole thing and if she’s trying something new, she’ll give up rather than stick around to figure out how to use a service.

I’ve told my mother on several occasions that she could pay her bills online in about a 10th of the time it takes her to write cheques and address letters and have made the argument that it’d be cheaper than paying for cheques and stamps and envelopes. She just smiles and me, agrees to let me show her how to do it and then continues paying her bills the way that she’s paid her bills for the past 30 years.

I really think sites should be designed well enough so that they’re accessible to people like my mother, but this isn’t something that’s easy to do. It’s really difficult to create interfaces that are easy to use for people who understand how the internet works. It takes real talent and ingenuity (and a lot of development time) to create interfaces that are going to make people like my mum feel comfortable using the site.

That said, is making life difficult for the mavens who will sit with mum and hold her hand while she uses the site really an acceptable trade-off? The mavens know how to use a search engine to find a better service and know what the internet can do and how sites generally work. The mavens are probably going to be the ones who recommended the website to my mum in the first place.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the argument for making sites that are easy to use for mums and dads feels a lot like the argument for making sites work in Netscape 4.7 that was used to kill any innovative idea a couple of years ago. We’ve got this incredibly difficult challenge to make sites that are usauble to both the geek elite and to my mum and I’ve got to wait for amazon.com to implement an idea and *then* it might be mainstream enough to put on my site. Not that I’m saying every interface idea I have actually makes the client experience better (I’m a programmer, they shouldn’t even be letting me near the interfaces) but without a little leeway for experimentation I can’t come up with new ideas that work.

Enough whinging I guess.. it’s all part of the job and one of the things that makes the job so interesting. :) Maybe one day I’ll come up with a solution and then I can buy myself a little island off the coast of Australia and retire knowing that I made the web a better place.