In the rush to adopt the latest technologies and trick out your app or site with the latest toys, a certain key design element is often overlooked: simplicity.

Now, I don’t presume to speak for all users, but as a computer user, I’m lazy as hell. I’m looking for things that are going to make my life easier and reduce the amount of thinking that I have to do.

And a lot of new web technologies are designed to do just that: tagging, bookmarking, social networking, search algorithms – it’s all designed to make it easier to get to the ‘good stuff’.

So why does it seem like so much work?

The amount of work required to bookmark a site and tag it with keywords so that someone else can have an easier time finding it loses its luster pretty quickly. It’s a novelty for sure, but if it takes me more than a few seconds, I’m not going to stick with it over the long haul.

And what about your mom? Try explaining tagging to your mom. Try to explain to her why she should use del.icio.us to store her bookmarks.

Yep. That’s what my mom said too.

I’m not saying these aren’t good ideas, they’re actually fantastic ideas. But their implementation is far from perfect. And for all that work, the results are sometimes frighteningly similar to what you’d get had nobody done any amount of tagging.

Granted, these are all relatively new phenomena, but that’s no excuse for poor implementations. I’m a developer myself and I know how difficult usability can be in an application – but there is definitely a difference between being functional and being usable.

It seems to me that these applications need to become more seamless, more invisible, and far more intelligent. The whole idea is that these are applications that act as a filter on content so that I only see things that interest me. And at the same time, they offer a way to discover new content, which makes ease of submission critical.

What they want to maximize is accuracy and quality, and minimize junk and work for the user. This way, they get lots of high quality submissions, and as a result, high quality results for their users.

However, currently, the system on many of these sites does none of those things. Here are a few suggestions to improve the user experience:

1. Title discovery. Why do I need to enter a title? The page or post likely already has a title. A little bit of code parsing can discover this easily. Give me the option to edit it if I want, but don’t make me enter it.
2. Tag discovery. Why do I need to duplicate the author’s work? Chances are the page already has a multitude of meta-data embedded in it. Why not borrow those? Again, give me the option to edit it if I want, but 99% of the time these are going to be similar to what I would’ve entered.
3. Intelligent results. Don’t show me garbage results or results from another language. Allow me to filter sites from my results so that they get better over time (see: reddit.com).
4. Don’t redirect me. If I want to bookmark the site, do not redirect me from the page I’m currently viewing. Pop up a new window if you have to, or automate my submission using the brand new 1 and 2 features.

None of these things is outrageous, and would simplify the experience of using the service. As a user, I’m simply looking for things that are going to improve my overall experience of something: music, news, browsing, etc.

The power of community input offers an inordinate amount of value to the content and a level of filtering that would be impossible by a single ‘editor’, however, with the burden of editing shifted to the users of the communities, there should at least be some level of responsibility on behalf of the developers to make life as easy as possible for those users.

After all, they are the ones that are making your application possible. So go easy on us, we’re lazy.

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Tags: web|software|technology|web2.0