De-comlexing – A Real World Example

I know I’ve been banging on about complexity and have been focusing on the world of corporate IT but the problem is just as rife in the retail world. I experienced a recent example when, after returning from a trip to the UK my mother-in-law decided that she wanted to start emailing her family in the old country.

Of course as her daughter and son-in-law “are in computers” she realised that this was no problem – and as usual we felt obliged to help her. Now she is no slouch in this modern world but she has successfully avoided the need for a computer for a few score years and ten. We therefore had our work cut out. In fact her chosen career was one of those that had been destroyed by IT – a printing compositor – she was kerning before you guys were even born!

So the project was kicked off - budgets set, no more than NZ$500, and timelines approved – be quick! Obviously it was going to be hard to provide her with a solution that she could use safely and simply without too much “shock of the new”. In fact the use of the word SIMPLE is something that really annoys me. It has been plagiarized by the world of technology and now used as a threat to one’s own self esteem. How many times have you seen it used to describe a product and then battled for days with the intricacies of setup? Some people find that fun (especially engineers on a fixed price project!), but trust me most don’t!

So the Tosh was bought – nice big screen for fading eyes – and then began the week long dumming down of Vista to allow it to be used. Removing auto-updates – she’s using dial-up – getting rid of icons – tightening firewall rules – installing AVG virus protection – automating dial-up settings – automating start-up and shut-down procedures – the list seemed endless. We set up a Yahoo mail account - shunning Outlook Express like the plague, we all know how dangerous that is – to avoid spam and virus problems.

My wife set about preparing detailed sets of procedures, awash with screen shots, for mum to access her emails and festooned stickers all over the keyboard to explain the various names for the keys. It’s a good job her daughter ended up being a business process analyst.

Finally the day of handover came and she was guided carefully through the various actions needed to converse with her family. It was tough but we did it in the end. Now she has a laptop that she can turn on, connect to her email and turn off without having to call her tech support team - me.

We also gave her strict instructions not to let anybody change anything on the computer and answer the question “You don’t want to do it like that – here I’ll show you” with “No it’s OK I am quite happy with the way I do it - please don’t change anything”.

At the end of this long road we have a very happy user doing exactly what she wanted with confidence, she doesn’t ring anymore she’s just getting on with it.

This is a classic metaphor for what’s wrong with our world, in order to provide simple solutions for our users we generally have to wrap up enormous levels of sophistication to hide endless levels of complexity. 

Why could it not just be simple to start with? 

PS Late update! She had problems today - a friend on ADSL changed something that screwed up her dial-up settings - it's an endless battle!