On March 9, 2001, America Online announced that it had passed the twenty eight million subscriber mark. More astounding, perhaps, is that AOL members are averaging almost seventy minutes on the service daily. That's an increase of 11% from the sixty-three minutes a year ago.
AOL remains one of the most successful online ventures, because it concentrates on delivering value to its subscribers and on making things as easy as possible. This is the very stuff which brought it ridicule in the early days of the Net.
AOL was referred to as "the Internet with training wheels." Other characterizations weren't nearly so friendly. But that very ease is part of what has fueled America Online's growth.
The first is that AOL pays attention to what people want. For years, Steve Case has said that he considers AOL more of a media company than a technology company, and that's true. As a media company, AOL concentrates on adding content and features that people really want.
As those content items and features are added, AOL works hard to make things as easy and intuitive as possible. It's ease that gets people on AOL--now 28 million of them. And it's ease that keeps them there even when there may be more resources available elsewhere.
There's two ways you can make things easy for me. The first is that you can make something possible that wasn't possible for me before. You can do that by speeding up my process, for example.
Microwave ovens do that. They let you cook faster, get meals done sooner. They deliver convenience and ease by giving you time.
You can bring resources together that weren't together before. Catalogs and websites both do that. Just before the turn of the 20th century, Montgomery Ward and Sears introduced farmers to the joys of shopping without going to town.
Instead of taking a few hours to take a buggy to town and browse through a limited selection, now you could browse an excellent selection of goods at very good prices. Not only that, the farmer wasn't limited to shopping only when the stores were open.
That's what the web is doing today. It's the mall that's more convenient, with no traffic or parking hassles. It's the mall that's always open. And you can compare prices in ways you never could before. The web, like the original catalogs is a concept that makes things easier.
But the concept only enough for a little while. When the concept becomes common, then design makes a difference. Some catalogs are simply more effective than others. Usually, they make the process of buying easier. Some websites are more effective than others, too.
We know that web shopping is easier that physical shopping. And the web, even more than catalogs, can function as a research front end to make physical shopping easier. That's why more than half the new cars bought in the US last year had research on the web as part of the process. That's true for lots of other big ticket items, too, like houses.
In order to be better at making things easier, we have to go beyond the basic catalog, or microwave, or web. We have to pay attention to good design. So what are some of those principles we can apply to websites?
Start with the basic physical functions. Make sure that your site works. It should load entry pages in ten seconds or less for a first time user with a dialup connection. Scripts and links and databases and forms and features should all do what they're supposed to.
Pay attention to language. Use the language that your visitors use. Don't use your own internal slang. Don't use industry jargon.
Put tools on your site that make it easy for folks to find things, learn about them and compare them. Start by putting a search engine on your site. It's a search engine that makes the Grainger site easier to use than the Grainger catalog, even though it has almost ten times the number of items.
Use what I call the three C's of stickiness--calculators, comparators, and configurators. People love to play with information. They like to try things out and compare options as part of their learning process.
There are two things you can do in the design process that will help you get a good idea of what folks want. One of them is obvious--use customers and prospects on your design team and listen to what they tell you.
The other thing may not be so obvious. Use stories, vignettes in your planning to describe actual user sessions and experience. You'll find that you can pack lots of information about people and their experience into a story and that it's easier to remember to boot.
Up to here it all sounds good. Everyone agrees. We know we should make things easier for folks. We know the basics of how to do it. But, so very often, we don't make things easy at all. The fact is that many things we use--catalogs, websites, microwaves and airplanes, telephones, packaging and just about everything else--simply are not done as well as they could be. Why?
One reason is that doing good design takes work and often costs money. The principles are easy, but execution is hard. And so many people and companies opt for the easy way at the design stage, which creates more difficulty and usability problems down the road.
This reason is magnified because many designers simply won't be using the things they design, or have very different experiences when they do. Take two examples.
The Fokker 100 is a nice small regional jet. Airlines like it. But I think that the fellow who designed the luggage racks should be consigned to some inner circle of Hell where he has to drag bags in and out of them again and again. The racks slant down, away from the aisles and have a lip on them. This means that you have to reach back into the bin, and practically lift your bag over the lip.
Did the fellow who designed this marvel ever actually try the design out? Did he even fly much?
Many web designers will never actually use the pages they design. The ones that do will probably do so using the best connections and equipment. To make things worse, they're often rewarded for technological innovation or graphic look, not usability. Result: pages that overload the dialup connection with a two year old computer that most folks use.
This is a variant on the idea of the seduction of technology where you do neat things simply because you can, not because it will achieve any business objective or enhance the user experience. This is not new with the web.
Think back to Beta and VHS. VHS became the dominant standard for home use while Beta virtually disappeared. Most discussions of this frame this as a "superior" technology losing out to a product that wasn't technically as good.
That wasn't the case at all. Beta was better on technical issues like picture and sound quality. But VHS was better on one quality that mattered--tape length. With VHS you got the whole movie on one tape. You only had to rewind one tape, return one tape to the store, or stock one tape on the shelves. VHS won because it was the superior technology on a dimension that mattered because it made the experience of the videotape user and video store owner easier.
There's another problem, too, and it's the subtle of all. It's culture. It's the way we (designers in this case) do things. And it's the way we (folks hiring designers) don't hold designer feet to the fire on important usability variables.
One of Jeff Bezos' good ideas was one-click ordering. So, being the boss, he called in design folk and told them what he wanted. They went away. They came back to show him what they'd done.
What they had done was create a one click ordering system where you clicked once and then got a confirmation dialog box. It was quite a fight to get the design folks to understand that one click meant one click total, not one click and a dialog box. It took work to make sure that the usability standard was met. And this was the boss doing the convincing. Imagine what it's like for lesser lights.
The problem was that a dialog box is part of lots of common computer processes where it's included for good reason. The fact is that it's so common that it's seen as normal. It's culture. It's one of those things you never question.
What's this tell us?
Making things easy for your customers and prospects is profit-building, but it's not easy. You have to work hard to make it happen. You have to step outside the organization and design with your customer's experience in mind. Then you have to step back inside and fight to make the deign you want a reality that your customer experiences.
This feature appeared on 14 May 2001
