Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Application Design, Second Edition

Chapter 6. Turn Beginners into Intermediates, Immediately

• Use Up-to-Speed Aids

• Choose Good Defaults

• Design for Information

• Stop Getting Up to Speed and Speed Things Up

• Provide Help Documents, Because Help Is for Experts

When we, the more computer-savvy users of the world, dive into a new application, we tend to learn everything we can as quickly as possible, hunting through all the nooks and crannies to uncover features and find out how the application stands up to others we’ve used. We want to see how far we can push the application. We strive to become experts.

Other people don’t do this. They get up to speed just enough to become productive with the application, and they stay at this level until there’s a compelling reason to learn ...