Mass-market sites need mass-market attitude to usability
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Towards the end of the Blogs and Social Media Forum in London last week, someone asked what made today's social media different from similar phenomena over the past 10 or 12 years of the Internet. What's the difference, for example, between MySpace and Geocities? The most important part of the answer, it seems to me, is the audience. The massive take-up of broadband has taken Internet access out beyond the preserve of geeks and techies and into the mass market. Here, the expectations of technology are very different to those that fuelled the early years of online growth. Consider another common technology. Some people want to know exactly how the internal combustion engine works; the rest are happy just driving. Talk about the early days of the Internet to anyone who was there and their stories are all about how difficult it was, how time-consuming and how rewarding when you got something to work. The developing mass audience isn't interested in any of that. They just want to get from A to B. This means that the standards expected from social media sites, and from all other commercial Web sites, are moving from those of the software world to those of consumer electronics. If sites are going to reach their full potential, they have to be easy to understand, simple to use, reliable and totally predictable. This isn't as trivial as it sounds. As the letter opposite from Simon Norris, MD of Nomensa, points out, usability is still a much-maligned and little-understood aspect of Web site design. Implicit in his letter is the fact that, in the offline world, usability has always been a vital part of good design. And there's another problem here, one that I discussed with Microsoft's chief advertising strategist Yusuf Mehdi recently. In the old days, if you released an upgrade with a new set of features, you knew you were releasing it to an audience that would be prepared to take time to figure out what those features were and how they could be used. That's not true of the mass market. Most, if not all, of the recent advances in automotive technology have taken place out of sight of the driver. They work without you even knowing they're there. A lot of software simply isn't like that. You have to know the features are there to be able to use them. But how do you explain them to a borderline tech-agnostic audience? Mehdi's answer is that new features need to be made easy to discoverable in the natural course of a person's activity. He also said that he didn't think the industry was good at this at the moment. He's right on both counts.We're going to have to get better. Fast. Michael Nutley, editor, NMA michael.nutley@centaur.co.uk
