Why Too Many Choices is Bad
2.09.2008 | Mac OS X
KISS it. Keep It Simple Stupid. We’ve all heard this before. The phrase can apply to many things including website development, business ideas, and so on. When an entrepreneur has too many ideas, they become an inventor with no real path. When a website or a program launches with too many options, users who don’t like bloatware scatter.
Such is the case yesterday when I tried to play a DVD on my Macbook Pro. Being a new Mac owner who is still discovering programs and features on my laptop, I assumed that this process “would just work” as many other things have over the past few months. However, it was not the case. (Disclaimer: some may say I was in a unique situation by having VM Ware installed and running both Windows and OSX)
So I popped a movie into my drive and nothing happened. (I found out later my instance of Windows on VM Ware had hijacked the drive.) Like most computer users, when things aren’t brought to me on a silver platter, I start hunting.
The first thing I tried were programs that were on my dock. I pulled up iDVD which turned out not to be a DVD viewing program at all. (Odd) The next one I tried was iMovie – again, not a DVD viewing program. Apparently there are more people making movies on these computers than people watching movies.
Frustrated, I then turned to Quicktime… unfortunately that did not yield the right player. Confused and frustrated, I opened up iTunes which completely ignored the DVD drive. That’s 0 for 4.
Although my situation here is a bit different than regular Mac users who don’t have multiple OS’s installed on their system. It does show how interfaces and naming conventions that were designed to be intuitive can still be confusing.
Ultimately after consulting with a friend, I learned there’s a DVD Player program that goes by the same name on the Mac which plays DVDs. Imagine that…
If nothing else, this experience has taught me to not name a number of different features with similar names. Of course the bigger lesson is to keep things simple. Instead of getting your users to figure out how to use your system, make sure they can use it effortlessly to do the tasks they need to do.