Have you ever bought an item of equipment that you thought could come in really handy only to leave it lying around for months because you could not figure out how to set it up? Or not set all the functions up, because it would have taken hours to read through the manual, which looked as if it had been translated by a machine anyway?
Most people have undergone the situation at some time or another. I had an alarm clock once that had dozens of features like waking me up at different times on the weekend to during the week and arbitrarily choosing a radio channel every day to wake me up. It also had a feature with which I could train it to understand some voice commands, but I could not be bothered with all that.
I simply wanted it to wake me up whenever I set it. Video recorders are similar items. How many times do you hear of individuals setting their video recorder to record a movie only to get a soap opera on another channel? It used to occur a lot, didn’t it?
The aspect that I am getting at here is that the designers of these instruments have been told to put as many functions as possible into them up to a price in order to be all things to all people. However, in making their machines so convoluted, a great deal of people decide not to bother using them at all and will avoid that make in the future, which is the exact opposite of what the manufacturers intended.
The next time you go out looking for some electrical implement, you will say to yourself: “Oh, So-And-So, you need a diploma to use one by So-And-So. I’m not getting one of theirs”.
So how can this concern you? Well, if you have to coordinate anything that you expect others to take part in or be animated about, try not to make it overly complex. I am not saying ‘dumb-down’, just don’t show off by putting all the bells and whistles on it merely to show that you can do that. People will not thank you for it, they will ignore your undertaking.
This has a great deal of implications for on line projects where people can be thousands of miles apart but still be collaborating on a joint development from home. Open source programming is a fine example of this type of work. The team leaders should keep everything as simple as possible if they want the maximum co-operation.
One way that you can use to test to see if your project is being understood is to ask. It sounds self-evident and it should be, but a lot of team leaders will not ask because they think that it makes them look weak and unknowledgeable. Again, in fact, the opposite is true. A good team leader is not a despot; a good team leader is a good organizer and is thoughtful.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a range of subjects, but is now concerned with Bose alarm clocks. If you would like to know more, please go to our web site at Bose Digital Radio.