incoherence.net

I just read this article in the current issue of Wired about how Craigslist is run by a seemingly nonchalant founder/customer support rep., and how a completely engineering-driven company tries to only listen to its users when coming up features and enhancements. Hence the circa 2000 look, cluttered interface, and minimalist functionality; they still grow because they started huge and take over online classifieds for cities one by one.

As someone who spent months in aggregate designing his own blog, works at a Silicon Valley startup, and specializes in front-end web development work – it’s a pretty sober reminder of the power of the network and steady momentum. CL doesn’t follow any of the rules of a what makes a “successful product” or even entrepreneurship, but somehow dominates its market. It’s a lesson in user behavior.

I.e., users are simple, simple creatures, comfortable with how things used to work regardless of inefficiency. We build muscle memory on which links to click, which fields to write in, and the flow of work for a given task; tweak parts even slightly, and suddenly the process feels unfamiliar, foreign, threatening. Still dunno why Yahoo keeps on doing it.

Worse, CL just laughs at the idea that design matters. What’s the point of spending hours tweaking rounded corners and figuring out the exact hover color of a link (not that I, uh, ever did that) when the fugly defaults get the job done and users are perfectly happy about how they function? After the “whoa, cool”ness factor fades, I suspect most users simply go back to their routine motions anyway.Props to the design if it manages to eek out a “y’know, I like this change after all” a few months hence.

I suspect that’s how Apple really retains its user base. Fancy Cover Flow and Core Animations are really just smoke screens for simple one-click functionality and reasonable preset options.

So, how to create something for people who don’t know and care little about how they want it? Like herding sheep, they says…