There is a growing group of users out there that believe it or not just want to jump online and do the things they want to do and get back offline with as little fuss as possible. These users want to do the things that many of these web 2.0 sites have to offer like keep in touch with friends, share media, or write a blog but many of the existing solutions just seem too intimidating for them. You probably all know someone like this in your life. Try explaining to them "It's so simple, you just go to this site to share photos, then go to this site to chat with friends, then go here to upload videos, and here to have an online calendar, and then you just use this site to bookmark all these other sites..."

If you think that it doesn't sound too complicated then you might not want to read on, but if you can start to see some of the problem that a lot of people are facing then keep going. I'm not saying that all these sites aren't great I'm just suggesting that they aren't for everyone and I think that it's becoming more and more obvious. You either get it or you don't, and honestly for the most part if you don't, then you are out of luck.

In order to appeal to this group of users who “don’t get it”, the applications need to be as simple as possible while still letting them do what they wanted to do in the first place. If some extra things can be done behind the scenes to do something in two steps for the user instead of four then it should be done in two. Also the apps not only need to work well, but they should appear fun to use so that they don’t intimidate them. It takes a lot of extra effort to achieve this sometimes, like spending more time on icons then you normally would or adding over the top animations, but in the long run it pays off. If the user experience isn’t there then it won’t matter how well they work because this group won’t use them in the first place. The biggest problem of all is in order to create applications for non-tech savvy users you have to think like them, which could be one of the hardest things for a developer to do since usually they are the most tech savvy people around.

I’ve been doing a lot of work experimenting with developing these sorts of applications for my website SnapPages. I can tell you from personal experience that it takes a lot of extra work to make things this “simple” but I’ve gotten a great response from the beta users. One of the greatest signs that it works is that my wife actually can and does use the website without needing any explanation from me. This might sound like a small thing but I assure you it is not, as she mainly uses the computer to check her email.

I’ll be trying to write some more articles for this site from time to time explaining more about SnapPages and giving some development tips for usability and things like that. It will probably depend on what sort of a response I get from it so let me know if you found this helpful/interesting and would like to read more.