Getting Past The ’Suck Threshold’
Kathy Sierra writes a great post in her blog, Creating Passionate Users, that talks about the requirement to make things interesting.
The driving objective is to accelerate the user adoption curve - which Kathy calls the Kick Ass Curve. Any user is initially forced to focus on the tool, and not the task. The better the design of the tool, the faster they can master it, forget about it, and focus on the task at hand. Her graph brings it home - initially, users are frustrated and unproductive. Until they gain enough competence with the tool, they are trapped below the suck threshold. They climb into competence, and eventually to mastery.
The amount of time it takes them to cross this threshold can be a proxy for the difference between sucky software and great software.
Microsoft Office uses commonality of interface very effectively to shorten the time in the suck zone. Each application has a ton of “learn the tool” material - and by using a common set of menus, commands and experiences, the Office team dramatically reduces the sucking time for new users. Once you can save a spell-checked word document, or a presentation with a stock template, you are likely to have crossed out of the suck zone. And the familiar commands required to do that are in familiar locations.
When designing web applications, the flexibility to do “anything” makes it easy to do unconventional things. We can use interesting to help the users cross the suck threshold. Kathy talks about some ways to do it. Maybe they don’t all easily apply in our particular case, but regardless, getting users past the suck threshold is critical.
In the consumer space, this can be the difference between having and not having a viral marketing effect. In the enterprise space, it can be the driver of user adoption rates (and if users don’t use it, there goes the ROI argument for the project).
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January 4th, 2006 at 2:04 am
[...] This morning I was working on a “How to design unit tests” document for my client, and I opened Watson, and I can’t tell you how good all of the links were, because the first one was so perfect. (Advanced Unit Testing, Part I - Overview, By Marc Clifton). While I was working away, I wanted to find a good link to an explanation of pair-wise testing, and in an intuitive place in the Watson UI was a widget that let me narrow my results - I entered “pair-wise”, and boom - first link again. It shows up as a sidebar on your desktop (like Trillian, ICQ and others), and can be minimized to the system tray (a lightbulb icon) I can’t tell you anything else about it yet, because I haven’t spent more than a total of 20 seconds interacting with the interface. To me, that’s high praise for the UI. And probably record time for clearing the suck-threshold. [...]
January 7th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
[...] Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold. [...]
February 8th, 2006 at 7:49 am
[...] Developers will never start using the suite. Make them want to use it, or make them use it. We believe you want to make them want to use it - both by evangelizing the benefits and by quickly crossing the suck threshold so that users get positive feedback. For this project, we have taken that approach, although it’s true that there is also a mandate from the dev team’s managers that we must make sure they use it. With process and education approaches that have proven effective, this is not a target of the current software solution. [...]
April 15th, 2006 at 7:17 am
[...] We’ve posted before about exceeding the suck-threshold by creating software that people can use. Another of Kathy’s great ideas. Visually, here’s what that looks like using the same framework Kathy has presented. [...]