Conceptual Clarity

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 10:21 am
Trackback URL: http://people.ephox.com/damien/2007/03/02/productivity-is-just-one-less-click-away/trackback/