Conceptual Clarity

Mike from Atlassian recently responded to the obvious derth of Australian startups on the software scene.  It's an interesting, complex and somewhat disappointing issue and it lead me to think about the issues facing software companies in my home state of Queensland, Australia.  Disturbingly though I think that the issues I'm seeing might be a little more fundamental than a lack of startups.  It appears that Queensland is, or soon will be, experiencing a lack of people to start those startups.  Put simply, I think we will soon be running low on IT graduates.

Queensland is currently riding the wave of Australia's mineral boom, a great thing for the state's economy.  Here in sunny Queensland we have enormous coal, alluminum and other mineral reserves, all of which are adding to the economy, offering jobs and attracting investment in spades (excuse the pun).  However, there is bad news in the offing for some other industries, including IT.  I've heard that IT-related enrolements are significantly down in two of Queensland's key universities, the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland.  They are down so much that QUT has dramatically reduced the size of its IT faculty and UQ is preparing to locate IT teaching at one of its secondary campuses outside of central Brisbane.

Further to this one of the Australian Fairfax papers recently published an article indicating that this is a national trend (it's quite an interesting article, so give it a read), with IT enrolements down at many east-coast universities.  For interest sake I also did a quick survey to see if jobs were also down, but they aren't.  A quick survey shows there are many jobs with IT staff of all kinds - from the help desk through to product management - in good demand all over Australia.

So there's not been a reduction in the number of IT jobs, nor does there appear to be a reduction in salaries, if anything they've increased.  Indeed as the flow-on effects of the economic boom kick in surely there will likely be more positions available with good salaries.  Though, from Ephox's experience in recruiting it is becoming harder to find the right people to fill IT positions and I expect that this is being felt throughout the industry. 

As an industry we should be asking ourselves how we can make this industry more attractive to young people seeking a career.  When I was at university I had never heard of product management and I never expected to be travelling the globe visiting clients, the industry has definitely delivered all I expected and then more.  We need to do a better job of articulating the opportunities within IT, the deversity of roles available and the fact that while the bubble burst, IT never went away and is a much needed part of business and our daily lives. 

As someone who enjoys life in a democratic country I know the benefits that choice can bring.  However, if you've ever attempted to build a program to control humanity, or if you've watched The Matrix Reloaded you will know that choice can introduce a fundamental flaw in your evil plans.  So at what point does choice go from good to bad?  At what point do all those benefits of choice transform into a bad Keanu Reeves movie and what does any of this have to do with business?  Well read on…

A few nights ago I was trawling through the great ABC (that's Australian Broadcasting Commission) video on demand libraries when I came across a very interesting story on choice from one of the ABC's science programmes, Catalyst.  Now before you go thinking "science schmience" the interesting part of this story is when they start to look at the way choices influence consumer behaviour.

In the story they run a quick experiment to demonstrate the benefits of choice and the perils of too many choices.  I won't go through all the details of the experiment here but in summary it demonstrates that when they presented people with 24 different jams to try and buy they attracted a lot of interest from potential consumers, however there were very few sales.  A similar group of people was then presented with only 6 different jams and while there were overall fewer potential consumers interested there were 10 times the number of sales.  Interesting!

So how does this apply to the software business?  Well in the software business we love choices, we love different versions and we love to produce variations on a theme but is all this choice bad for business?  Time for some self analysis.  About a month ago I was having some Windows problems (that's right, laugh it up Mac users) and I thought I might just go for the Vista upgrade instead of an XP re-install.  The first thing I discover is that Vista has some good benefits for memory management, multimedia and it looks pretty (all good so far).  The very next thing I find out is that there several different versions, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate to name a few, so now I have to find out which one to buy.  Well I tried, I checked out the very informative Vista SuperSite from Paul Thurrott and managed to get myself even more confused as to which version I wanted (the site was clear, my wants were not).  Back in the Windows XP days this was easy Home or Pro, now I just wind up confused; curse you choice!

At the end of all that I decided that I would stick with the devil I know, so I'm still a Windows XP user.  Why?  Well I think it's because I had too many choices - Ephox would have kindly covered the cost of Vista for my company laptop.  It's not only Microsoft that suffers from this, I think many companies have gone down the same road.  I know I certainly experienced the same problems when evaluating some issue tracking systems recently and certainly every time there are separate editions of the same product.  Incidentally, I also have similar issues when shopping for any kind of electronics, whether it's a TV, washing machine or mobile phone.  The end result is that I almost invariably delay my purchase, or just not purchase something at all.

So yes, choice is good, and I am glad I live in a society where I can chose what career I can follow and who my elected officials are.  However, too much choice can drive me nuts.  It can prevent me from purchasing and cause me to over-invest in evaluating the options, further delaying any purchase and increasing the chance that I will just give up and not buy anything.  If you're about to introduce a new purchasing option for your products stop and think "is this going to enable us to enter a new market or just further fragment and confuse our existing one?"  If the answer is the latter, well then chose your path wisely!

As the product manager for EditLive! I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can enable people to be more productive using one of the most familiar software applications - the word processor.  Certainly there are major features that can improve productivity in leaps and bounds - spell checking as you type, or track changes for instance - but, for me, making productivity gains in any piece of software is a game of clicks.

When you think about your user interface design give some thought as to how many clicks it’s taking your users to browse around the interface.  As a user a click is not just a click, it’s a series of actions.  You start by looking for the command you want, you then move the mouse and make a click, you may then have to interpret the new dialog or information presented on screen and then, finally, perform the action you wanted to perform.  The effect of adding clicks is even worse for web applications where each click can mean another HTTP request and, even in the age of AJAX, a screen refresh.  Sure, most of the time this is a process performed in less than 10 seconds or so, maybe a minute for a very slow web application - but those 10 second blocks add up and they add up fast and they add up to dollars.

For example, lets take a team of 50 knowledge workers getting paid about $30 an hour each.  As part of their daily tasks they have to add information to a wiki, to a blog and perhaps to a content management system.  To do this our hypothetical knowledge workers will be using my favourite web word processing interface; EditLive!.  Conservatively I’m going to assume that we can save each one of these people 10 minutes a day (that’s only about 60 clicks a day).  Over the course of the year this means a saving of $62,500 just through a few less clicks.

When playing the game of click minimization though you need to be careful not to confuse it with feature minimization.  Fewer clicks does not mean fewer features, it simply means making the commonly used features easier to find and use.  A great example of this is the Apple iPod.  With my iPod I can do anything from browse a photo library through to playing a song, but the most commonly used functionality is simply a button press away in the form of the play button.

When looking at EditLive!’s interface there are several of things that we do for click minimization.  For starters there is the context menu, making it easy to access the most relevant commands for a particular cursor location within two clicks (a right and then a left).  Then there’s the keyboard UI, for example, the tab key can be used to add four spaces, indent a list, outdent a list or add a table row all depending on where the cursor location is.  Finally there are the EditLive! dialogs that will not be blocked by popup blockers (saving all those clicks to allow popups) and they’re already cached by EditLive! ensuring you never have to wait for the web server to send you the dialog.

All these elements quickly add up and you can see that it doesn’t take long to reach savings of over $60,000 a year.  So, if you’re designing a user interface today or evaluating a productivity tool put some thought into how many clicks your users will have to go through because it will save you time and money.