4. BUILDING FOR CHOICE: ALLOWING IMPORT AND EXPORT 27
around incompetence; at some point, you just need genuine ability. When it comes to pleasing users, this generally has two parts: First, you need the basic skill of empathy, the ability to put yourself in a user’s shoes and see things through their eyes. But for that to work, you also need to know what it’s like inside a user’s head, and as far as I can tell the best way to do this is just to spend lots of time with them.
The best usability expert in the world, Matthew Paul Thomas, spent the first few years of his life doing tech support in a New Zealand cybercafe. This is the kind of job you imagine Stalin exiling programmers to, but Thomas made the best of it. Instead of getting angry at dumb users for not understanding what a “Taskbar” was, he got pissed off at the idiots who designed a system that required such arcane knowledge. And now that he’s in a position to fix such things, he understands at a deep visceral level what their flaws are.
I wouldn’t wish to force such an exile on anyone (well, I suppose there are a couple anonymous UI designers who might be candidates), but there’s certainly no shortage of people who already possess a user’s intuition to various degrees. The problem is that no one listens to them. It’s always so easy to dismiss them as naive or dumb or out-of-touch. After all, the additional menu bar option you want to add makes perfect sense to you—how could it really make things worse?
When a company does focus on their users, it’s a real shock. Take Zappos, an online shoe store. Zappos is fanatical about customer service. They quietly upgrade first-time purchasers to overnight delivery, they write cards and send flowers when the situation warrants it, and they not only give complete refunds but pay for shipping the shoes back as well. It’s the kind of company people rave about. But, most interestingly for our purposes, if they don’t have the shoe you want in stock, they try to find you a competitor that does!
From the short-term perspective, this seems insane: why would you actually do work to help your customers buy shoes from someone else? But, in the long term, it’s genius. Sure, you may make one purchase somewhere else, but not only will you go back to Zappos for every other shoe purchase for the rest of your life, you’ll also write long, glowing blog posts about how awesome Zappos is.
This is one of the secrets of success on the Web: the more you send people away, the more they come back. The Web is full of “leaf nodes”—pages that say something interesting, but really don’t link you anywhere further. And leaf nodes are great—they’re the core of the Web in fact—but they’re the end of a journey, not the beginning. When people start their day, or their web browser, they want a page that will take them to a whole bunch of different sites and perspectives, not just try
