My sales team and users are constantly telling me to keep Fusion Accounts easy to use.  They also want more and more functionality.  So they want easy complexity.  The WII successfully implements two principles that we try to adhere to in the design of Fusion Accounts.

KISS

The first is the age old KISS principle.  KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid or as Albert Einstein put it "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".

Technologists such as myself love to use the latest “Whiz Bang” technologies.  What we often fail to forget is that users want things easier and don’t care what technology is used.  As part of our recent website revamp we asked all our employees to list there favourite website and explain why they liked them so much.

Without exception they listed sites such as Google, Gumtree and Easyjet as not only being great as they did what they wanted them to do but also because they did it in an uncluttered and simple way.

Google has to be the best example of the KISS principle.

“Old” internet users like me remember in the “early” internet days there was Netscape’s guide to the internet and  Yahoo had a category listings pages that were manually maintained.  Then in 1995 came AltaVista from DEC – which was a proper web crawler that indexed pages. It had a search.

Then along comes Google – which had one text box and a search button.  Ok – now behind the front page there is lots of other stuff Google can do for you and their business model and tools for paid advertising are great but I think what really made Google so popular was its simplicity.  And today the main page still features a text box and a search button.

In developing Fusion Accounts we have tried to adhere to this principle – but it is difficult.  Accounts have much more than one box!

So – we have tried to make each part of the system show just enough detail to allow the user to do what they need to do with extra bangs and whistles available to the advanced user.  We feel we have succeeded well in this, our users tell us they prefer it to other systems that they used to use – but we know new users who have not used any accounting systems before can find some of the concepts tricky.

Luckily as an online provider we are able to implement continuous improvements from user feedback.

The Principle Of Least Surprise or Astonishment

“In user interface design, programming language design, and ergonomics, the principle (or rule or law) of least astonishment (or surprise) states that, when two elements of an interface conflict, or are ambiguous, the behaviour should be that which will least surprise the human user or programmer at the time the conflict arises.”

My 3 year old daughter can use the WII!

The WII’s user interface uses big buttons.  It is uncluttered and there are always only a few choices.  If you need to do something in you can’t continue until you have done it.

The layout of each page is consistent, the options are consistent, the buttons to push are consistent.

This is quite difficult to apply.  One of the “Surprises” that we are currently addressing in Fusion Accounts is the use of negative numbers.  Most people know what a negative number is but it seems to surprise accountants who are much happier with credits and debits or brackets to indicate numbers less than zero.

So we have to consider who it is we want not to surprise.  Sometimes this provides us with a dilemma.  Our user’s who are accountants and bookkeepers  like to see codes for nominal accounts.  For example, when recording a payment for electricity then want to type a code for electricity.

To give least surprise we have used similar codes to Sage – so accountants are familiar with these.

Businesses users though are generally not used to Sage and do not know these codes.  They just want to say the payment was for Electricity.

We are currently making how the Nominal Account (payment category) is selected a user option.  We just need to make sure the number of user options does not break the KISS principle!