Sep 19 - Nielsen, Feature Richness and User Engagement (Alertbox)

Feature Richness and User Engagement

Summary: The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment -- especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.


In designing any user interface, one of your key decisions concerns the tradeoff between features and simplicity. The more features, the more complicated the system inevitably becomes.

* Features have to be shown to users, so screens get busier.
* Menus get bigger and/or more numerous, making it harder for users to find the features they need.
* Features must be explained, ballooning the size of the help system and/or the manual:
* Each extra feature offers more rope for users to hang themselves: they're more likely to use the wrong feature, either as an error of intent (a mistake caused when they think the wrong feature is the one they need) or as an error of execution (that is, a slip, as when they click the wrong button in a crowded toolbar).
* The number of feature interactions grows by the square of the number of features: more can go wrong, and it becomes harder for users to understand why a change in one corner of the system has an effect in another corner.
* The more options users have to choose from, the more time it takes their brains to prepare for action and decide what to do.

The answer seems clear: minimize features and chase simplicity at any cost. This is indeed the case for most user interface design, but not for all projects.

Right-Click: An Extra Feature That Works

Right-click helps medium-skilled users because it's a consistent interaction technique that works the same everywhere. (Indeed, high-skilled users are often disappointed when an application doesn't support right-click -- for example, if it's implemented in Flash and brings up the Flash player menu instead of contextually-appropriate application commands.)
Right-click also works because business professionals and other mid-level users typically depend on their PCs and are willing to learn a few techniques to use it better.

User Engagement Levels

Users' willingness to learn is the most important factor in how much complexity you can allow in the user experience. If people are extremely excited about a user interface, they'll welcome more features and will spend the time to figure them out.

Mostly, though, users have a low engagement level with user interfaces and just want them to get out of the way. People don't want to spend time learning, they want to spend time doing -- a well-documented effect called the paradox of the active user.
(It's a paradox because people might save time in the long run if they spent more time learning about powerful features. But, empirically, users almost never want to do this, and you should design for how people actually behave, not how you wish they behaved.)

Three Levels of Photoshop Complexity

Adobe ships three Photoshop versions targeted at three different user engagement levels:
* Photoshop CS (list price $650), targeted at professional graphics artists and photographers.
* Photoshop Elements (list price $100), targeted at photography enthusiasts and people who want to do basic image manipulation, such as cropping screenshots.
* Photoshop Album Starter Edition (free), targeted at average consumers who've just bought a digital camera and might want to fix a redeye or brighten a dark image.

However, the very success of such training products proves that users will gladly pay more than the price of the software to learn how to use it. For professional users, Photoshop creations are their work products, and being able to make a picture look better is worth almost any amount of training and user interface complexity.
To its credit, Adobe recognized that Photoshop CS is much too complicated for people who just want to clean up their personal photos. Most users don't need that many powerful features, and they certainly don't want to read beefy manuals and extra books just to get a better-looking vacation snapshot.
The Photoshop Elements manual is both thinner and easier to read than the CS manual. And the documentation for Photoshop Album is only 20 pages long.

Each of the three versions is appropriately targeted at a particular level of user engagement, from people who care passionately about image manipulation to those who aren't particularly interested in graphics software.

Shallow Engagement with Websites

Where does your website fall on the 1-3 scale of user engagement we saw for Photoshop? Outside the scale, at level 4. People don't want to read 20 pages of instructions to use a website. They demand instant gratification or they leave.
The user engagement level with websites is incredibly low, as dictated by information foraging: people don't commit easily to any individual site, because it's so easy to get to other sites. Skimming the cream from each site is usually the superior browsing strategy.
As studies in my recent book document, users visiting a new site spend an average of 30 seconds on the homepage and less than 2 minutes on the entire site before deciding to abandon it.
(They spend a bit more time if they decide to stay on a site, but still only 4 minutes on average.)

Loyal Users: Higher Engagement Levels?

Some websites can build user loyalty and grow user engagement levels across subsequent site visits. Such sites can gradually introduce more advanced features for those users who become sufficiently committed to the site.

A famous example is Amazon.com's one-click shopping feature. It's complicated to understand, and pretty scary to boot. Still, one-click shopping helps some users. Amazon's usability rules differ from those for most other sites because it's big enough and established enough that many users have established a close relationship with the site and are thus willing to engage at some level of depth.
But even Amazon makes it easy to shop in the traditional way by using the shopping cart, which is a design pattern that everybody knows by now. Indeed, I strongly advise the vast majority of websites to scale back their features and dramatically simplify the user experience for initial use. After all, to progress to the deeper engagement levels, prospective customers must first successfully pass through the initial use phase.

Thus, websites should have almost no features: focus on the words.


...companies need systematic usability studies: to make explicit the fact that outside customers don't find your design as important as you do (because you work on it all year).

source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 6, 2007:
Feature Richness and User Engagement
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/features.html
Feature Richness and User Engagement (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)