Needed: Simple Technology
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008Technological solutions need to be simple - drop-dead simple - to be successful. If we want to make our apps accessibile to everybody, then we need to eliminate the learning curve.
Let’s pick on content management systems. There’s Drupal, Expression Engine, SilverStripe, Django, TextPattern… the list goes on and on.
They are all great tools for managing content. On the other hand, you need to have a bit of savvy to use them. Take Drupal, for example. It’s a powerful and flexible framework, but I wouldn’t turn it over to the marketing guy and walk away (I know, I used to be the Marketing Guy).
For decent interaction design for Everyman we can look to social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter are easy to use. In the case of Twitter, there is a very simple core feature set that’s fine for most folks, but just below the surface there are a ton of other goodies that experts can put to use when tweeting. That’s the hallmark of a killer app.
So when creating successful interaction design, start with simple - and keep it that way.
