“A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.”
–Jef Raskin, Creator of Apple’s Macintosh
Are your websites or apps wasting your customers’ time or require your customers to do more work than is strictly necessarily? Let me give you 3 examples to explain the quote of Jef Raskin, creator of Apple’s Macintosh.
(1) Keynote Tells Me Slide Is Linked, But Doesn’t Tell Me Which Ones
Apple’s Keynote is a presentation application like Microsoft’s PowerPoint. I was making some Keynote slides the other day. When I tried to delete a slide, Keynote warned me that “objects or text on other slides link to” the slide that I wanted to delete. I was grateful for the warning. However, without knowing which slides were linked, I had to check all the slides to find the slides linked.
Why couldn’t Keynote do 1 more step? Just tell me the sequence numbers of the slides that are linked to the slide that I want to delete. It is the information that Keynote has already computed. It would save me a lot of time.
(2) Chrome Tells Me It Is Out Of Date, But Doesn’t Let Me Update Immediately
One day I noticed that the Chrome browser’s menu button turned red. I clicked on the button and saw “Chrome is Out of Date”. I clicked on the text and expected that Chrome would let me update it immediately. However, the text was not clickable. The browser did not provide any link for me to update it. At the end, I went to the Chrome website and downloaded the latest version of the browser.
Why couldn’t Chrome do 1 more step? That is, give me a link in the browser, so that I could download the newest version immediately. For example, change “Chrome is Out of Date” to “Chrome is Out of Date. Update Now >”, and make the text a link to download the newest browser.
(Chrome was supposed to update automatically, but somehow it didn’t work. On the About Google Chrome screen, I had the “Update failed (error: 10)” message, and I had no idea what it meant.)
(3) Tell Me The Opportunity, But Don’t Let Me Take Action Immediately
The Bowel Cancer Education Center at Chinese University of Hong Kong found that “more than 14 per cent of Hong Kong people aged 50 to 70 may have bowel cancer or its precursor”. The center wanted to recruit participants for screening, so I went to its website to help my dad register.
The Bowel Cancer Education Center’s homepage showed the news about the screening registration prominently. I clicked on “free bowel cancer screening registration” quickly. Unfortunately, the underlined text was not a link. It took me a while to find the real link to the registration form. (The link’s label on the Chinese version of the homepage was not as intuitive as the English version.)
Why couldn’t the Bowel Cancer Education Center do 1 more step? That is, make the underlined text a link to the registration form. When the link is more accessible, more people can submit the form themselves, and thus reduce the workload of the 24-hour hotline.
