We are all monkeys

Over the weekend I read Seth Godins book called “The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Web Site Better”. In his book Seth explains that people who are browsing the web aren’t smart, web savvy, patient with lots of time on their hand people. They wont read all of the content we write and then take time to make the correct decision on what to do next. They are basically monkeys, time poor and just want to get to what they want in the fastest possible way. Which in most cases involves clicking on the first thing that catches their attention within 5 seconds from the time the page was displayed. Just like a monkey if you want it to do something or go somewhere then all you need to do is offer it a banana and off he goes. Seth’s motto is one page one banana.

This got me thinking, its not only people browsing the web that are monkeys its everyone using software whether its an email client, spreadsheet, basecamp whatever all we want to do is get the task done in the quickest possible way. So show me the banana, how do I get from point A to point B get the job done and get out of there. No one really wishes that they could spend more time just navigating around an application trying to figure out what to do next to finish their task.

From now on I’m going to put bananas into the applications I build to help people get the task done. This means where possible simplifying each page/section down to one banana. Let the user do what they need to do and get out of their way.

Let me know what you think?