I want to hold your hand

I am coming around, guys. An average tech-savvy-ish American: uses iGoogle widgets so they get news from various sources every day. But doesn't what RSS is, much less why they'd want to export their opml file. Twitter sounds like other peoples' business, and FriendFeed sounds like the sort of thing the government is up to.

So... they have a sense of getting headlines from multiple sources, maybe even more than what Google News can provide. They might even do a little light configuration if there was adequate hand-holding involved. Google are the *masters* of hand holding.

Kevin Fox once criticized a post of mine in FriendFeed; It was a smidgen out of context at the time, but it is dead on from a market positioning perspective:

"It's ever expanding circles. First design for Louis Gray, then for the other 50,000 early adopters, then for their 500,000 friends, then their moms. If you design for their moms first you'll never get the early adopters and moms won't use a service without momentum because they're not good at seeking out the new. Mind you, this is for actual startups. Products with guaranteed initial exposure (like anything Google launches) has different rules. - Kevin Fox"

The actual sentence in question was "When designing UX think about what your mom would use, not what Louis Gray would use." Which is lucky, because I have struggled mightly with the realization that the project that we're going with is in some ways just more duct tape in a web 2.5 environment that seems to be ALL DUCT TAPE. It is some consolation that our idea is dedicated to 'noise' elimination, but in a fit of pique I might very well have said "Forget the echo chamber, let's design it for everyman!"

But what I (fortunately) was going for in that statement was that I want the UX to have that "hand holding" feel Google does. I want you to be using the site well before you even realize you are doing so. Because frankly, I may be an earlier-ish adopter, but I'm everyman too. I smiled in real life when I found out how easy it was to set up Google AdSense. I still get frustrated and quit a new site at the first counterintuitive speed bump or forced account creation. Almost no site "takes" on the first try with me. I would argue that we never have a 'hair on fire' use case - when our urgent, unfilled need makes us willing to struggle through inferior interfaces and functionality - when it comes to news or networking.

So for product positioning by all means target Louis Gray and the other first-adopters, but when you're designing an interface make sure to hold your users' hands.

photo credit vc wear